Monday, August 02, 2010

Karoshi?

Karoshi (?) may not be the best name for a school-oriented Linux distribution, imho. Teachers do work hard, but I'm not sure if the creators didn't do their research or were deliberately being ironic. Karoshi is also the name of a game that came out in 2008.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The creators did research the meaning first, and it was meant to be irony.

Blues Tea-Cha said...

OK, cool, but that's a little dark to promote for a school environment, as for when the school board or principal asks, "What does 'Karoshi' mean, anyway?" If it was intentional, maybe the Jisatsu® OS would have been more appropriate.

Anonymous said...

I don't think it was meant to mean suicide or be dark, but it's just what I read from their FAQ. This is what it says:

What does Karoshi mean?
Karoshi means 'death by overwork' in Japanese. We stumbled across the name and it's meaning, from a
British newspaper in a column about unusual words. We thought it would be ironic, as we know how hard
teachers and system administrators work in schools. We thought as the operating system was designed to
take the hard work out of running Linux servers in schools, that it would mean our user wouldn't 'die from
overwork' or as we took it to mean get over exhausted/stressed. It has never been our aim to offend those
who have died from this condition and it was more of a light­hearted poke of how overworked and stressful
it can be to run servers in schools.

Blues Tea-Cha said...

Thanks, anonymous! (love your poetry) Good detective work. I wasn't sure that "Karoshi" wasn't the name of a local species of lotus in Karachi or something. Actually, I think I didn't even look into it because the name actually does put me off a bit. The power of words... I'd be more likely to run Edubuntu (am running it now, actually) or Skolelinux, Debian-edu or whatever, altho Karoshi could well be technically superior. "Karoshi" would be my last choice. All else being equal, the name gives a bad impression, and branding does make some difference, altho most people probably wouldn't notice it or know what it means. I don't want to be an oversensitive person telling them it hurt my feelings, or to get a new name, but I do think it handicaps them if they were hoping for mass adoption in a state's school system, for example. How about Iruka? Kujira? Japanese distributions are called "Vine" and "Berry" so foreign words seem to be appealing.