Quebec's latest bid to break away from Canada HALTED by a single dot It was not the news the company behind the new dot-quebec domains wanted to hear. Just days before launch, dot-quebec's biggest supporter – the government of the Canadian province of Québec – ditched its plan to move from .gouv.qc.ca to the much simpler and more convenient .quebec. Apparently the shift in websites would be too …
I don't know much about this, but I'm having difficulty grasping the concept that any sizable government would let a measly $12M get in the way of something that closely aligns with their past policies and would be highly visible. Don't they spend a whole lot more on programs that are far less defensible? Just how poor IS Quebec?
We are apparently poor enough that the government of Quebec is contemplating austerity measures which will see us lose some of our social programs. Though we will still be losing a good 1/3 of our salaries to provincial taxes each year.
This despite the CAD $2billion in transfer payments we get each year from the richer provinces.
Seeing as the PQ lost the election earlier this year there's really no incentive for the current Liberal government to go ahead with a PQ vanity project. Why promote a project intended to provide PR for your opponents?
The heyday for separatism was in the 1980s and 90s, and even then it lost when put to referendums. People only vote for the PQ as a sort-of-socialist alternative to the Liberals, but only if they promise to put separatism on the back burner for the course of their mandate. Lately though, they're having to struggle to stay out of third place.
Oh, and the reporter pointing to a PQ party web site as being some sort of objective history of Quebec is a bit disingenuous and intended as flame bait.
Don't they just Cut-and-Paste the DNS pointers? Or perhaps Copy-and-Paste, to make sure it all works first?
I suppose that they'd have to go though with a Find-and-Replace for all the internal links. That could be done live if both domains point back to the same server.
Can't see it taking more than a week.
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Except Yield is give way not stop. Stop signs saying, you know, stop.
Perhaps the comment was intended to address the differences in "driving style" between regions. For practical purposes, all three are considered equivalent* depending on where you find yourself driving.
* Stop = Yield = Give Way = Just flip everyone off as you cruise through the intersection
but don't forget:
USA:- YIELD
must be something in the North American air that makes them want to be different.
No, YIELD is quite different in regards to traffic rules than STOP.
STOP requires an actual STOP, your wheels must stop rotating. You can receive a traffic summons for failing to fully stop the forward movement of your vehicle at a STOP sign.
YIELD means that you do not have the full right-of-way but may proceed, without necessarily stopping, depending upon opposing traffic conditions. If a full STOP is required due to a large amount of oncoming traffic, then you must STOP and NOT attempt to merge into said oncoming traffic until and unless it is safe to do so without interrupting or endangering oncoming traffic flow. If a STOP is not required, as your actions will not impede traffic, then you may proceed fully at your own discretion.
A YIELD is often set at a junction where two lanes of traffic merge at a non-right angle; the traffic path with the posted YIELD sign (the "minor" road or slip lane, which we call on-ramps) is expected to come up to prevailing road speed of the "major" road and the driver is expected to integrate smoothly, by their own recognizance, into the flow. If there is not enough area for the slower road traffic to come up to speed without endangering the faster road, a STOP sign is put in exchange to force the slower lane to await a full break in traffic in order to merge safely.
STOP and YIELD are very different traffic actions.
"Which all explain why, when French-Canadian programmes are shown on French TV, they are subtitled in French like all foreign-language shows."
I see a lot of that with Scottish and English shows having been sub titled in English for the US market. Canadian french is certainly different and uses lots of archaic constructs and words.
My favourite translation ever was on Portuguese TV. They translated fair dinkum the Aussie term for the truth or straight up and they had it as faire dinkum in French which as we all know is to do dinkum.
Now I have been around a bit and no a few things but I have never done dinkum and I am not sure I would wish to, consensual partner or otherwise.
> they are subtitled
This doesn't really make sense. For a start, almost every program on French TV had subtitles available (normal and for the hearing impaired) through teletext, and nowadays the same occurs on digital TV.
Secondly, aside from Arte, which is a German-French station, films are almost universally dubbed rather than subtitled so I don't buy your bit about foreign language shows either.
And I spent a few sorry years in that shitho... in France.
I don't buy your bit about foreign language shows either.
French law. Any TV programme that doesn't have a French soundtrack must be subtitled in French. The fact that it can be done digitally now, and the user can choose whether or not to have them, is irrelevant.
Dubbing obviously solves the problem differently, a dubbed programme no longer counts as "foreign language".
@PO'S: "subtitles"
In Anglo Canada, I've seen English subtitles when Newfoundlanders speak on TV documentaries. They're speaking English, just not as we know it Jim.
Then again, same thing for some of the British. Subtitles.
I was in the southern USA recently. I could barely understand some of them.
A native of Quebec, a french speaking guy but fluently bilingual, had an opportunity to visit France. He was very excited. First trip back to the ancient motherland.
He came back a week or two later simply furious. Apparently even the food service staff in France told him that he spoke french like a barking dog, and requested that he just use English.
Oyyy, send the buggers back to Ireland as well you wee gobshite <insert smiley thing>.
I love France and all things French. Vive la France, Vive la Guerre et Vive le Sacre Mercenaire.
Wanders off into the distance marching at 88 paces per minute and singing Eugenie les l'armes aux yeux.
The costs probably cover the reissue of all certificates, rewriting of all the doc... including offline, dead-tree doc, all the forms, reissue of all signage in all the local agencies (and all the national parks etc). It's not just a website, it's pretty much everything printed or painted by the government across the whole province, covering some rather serious matters including taxes and immigration. Even just paying someone to cover existing signs with a sticker is going to cost dearly. They could make the switch gradually by setting an alias and supporting both domains in parallel but I don't see this as cheap either. In any case the liberal gov. is not likely to do it as it would peeve its federal "masters"; that was always a PQ project.
Having worked on web and other projects for the province of Quebec, I can assure you that $12M is probably a low estimate.
There are processes and documents and approvals (as you quite rightly say) that stagger belief. Not to mention that there are specific web-accessibility guidelines in Quebec.
And you can't offshore any of the work because all meetings, emails, documents, and content have to be in (Quebecois) French. And all the work has to be done onsite because there are no remote access facilities.
I'm getting a headache remembering the four hours spent in a meeting debated whether "rédaction" in French truly meant the same as "redaction" in English of if there was a better purely Quebecois French word that could be used instead
> The costs probably cover the reissue of all certificates, rewriting of all the doc...
Except that would not be necessary. When the Catalan public administration moved from the various domains they were using¹ to .cat they did not immediately reissued anything--it was all updated over the years, with the original domains redirecting to .cat as necessary, or simply left there.
Then again, these estimates can be made to say whatever you want them to, depending on your agenda.
¹ .net, .com, .org, even .gi, ...anything but .es, though this was as much for practical as for political reasons at the time.
Living in Quebec City, being a long-time "El Reg" reader, and as a former C++ programmer, I just had to pipe up! But no, I don't have an intelligent comment, apart from agreeing with the "Anonymous Coward" here above ("Having worked on web and other projects for the province of Quebec, I can assure you that $12M is probably a low estimate.")
At work, we once joked we should start a company specialized in government name-changing. For example, every government department seems to change names after every provincial election, usually to add something fashionable and politically correct. So over time the "Department of Energy" becomes the "Department of Energy, Wind Turbines, Sustainable Development and Abandoned Kittens" (OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, but only a bit!) And every time, they change all the signs on all the buildings, all the letterhead paper, all the websites, etc. Easy money!
What actually surprises me is that they **didn't** spend all that money for the vanity ".quebec" top-level domain.
So over time the "Department of Energy" becomes the "Department of Energy, Wind Turbines, Sustainable Development and Abandoned Kittens" (OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, but only a bit!)
Which is the exaggeration; the "Sustainable Development" part?
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