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Get training on procurement process through whatever level of government you are with (e.g. US Federal, Ontario provincial, etc.). Then you will know what purchasing options are available. The problem is that many departments and agencies have cut their procurement & supply staff, and those remaining tend to be at best amateurs in their knowledge about IT purchases, and most IT departments staff avoid dull training like procurement, and thus their purchases are done in a very ad-hoc manner, and often reflect personal bias (like only buying from Dell).

In the USA, at the federal level the government U.S. General Services Administration runs a program GSA Advantage.

In Canada the federal government Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC) runs a Standing Offer Index including a specific one for microcomputers. For generic office PCs, these are starting points that are "pre-approved" purchases so you don't need to create and advertise and evaluate and have contested a RFQ (Request For Quotes), and as well the purchasers can also do LPO (local purchase offers) or RVD (Request Volume Discount) and likely other techniques I don't know of in particular if the Index is out of date, or a large volume purchase may warrant a discount.

Also learn and understand TCO - Total Cost of Ownership, that is the overall cost of the purchase (i.e. a PC in this case) including repairs / replacement components, down time due to failure - including the cost of have the employee unable to fully function at their job, plus cost in time & labour of IT staff for deployment (roll-out) including disk imaging (by vendor or IT), as well as overall satisfaction of the agency with the IT department's perceived value. This is standard IT management (CIO and below) knowledge, so talk to an intelligent IT manager for any help you need in this regard.

Unless you have scores of idle IT staff, assembling 1000 PCs is a lot of labour and time. And that's assuming you pick a hardware configuration that works, is stable, and is reliable. Most IT departments are staffed with strictly software oriented system administrators as their rank and file, with reasonably few if any computer hardware technicians and tools. And "at-home builders" experience don't cut it in a professional setting; it's a starting point for new hires, not a substitute for fully trained technicians. I'm sure that will cause flames, but I don't care, and to wit, I'm not a computer hardware technician, but I have respect for the few I have worked with, they were excellent at their job, and knew which end of the soldering iron to hold when making custom serial cables.

Get training on procurement process through whatever level of government you are with (e.g. US Federal, Ontario provincial, etc.). Then you will know what purchasing options are available. The problem is that many departments and agencies have cut their procurement & supply staff, and those remaining tend to be at best amateurs in their knowledge about IT purchases, and most IT departments staff avoid dull training like procurement, and thus their purchases are done in a very ad-hoc manner, and often reflect personal bias (like only buying from Dell).

In the USA, at the federal level the government U.S. General Services Administration runs a program GSA Advantage.

In Canada the federal government Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC) runs a Standing Offer Index including a specific one for microcomputers. For generic office PCs, these are starting points that are "pre-approved" purchases so you don't need to create and advertise and evaluate and have contested a RFQ (Request For Quotes), and as well the purchasers can also do LPO (local purchase offers) or RVD (Request Volume Discount) and likely other techniques I don't know of in particular if the Index is out of date, or a large volume purchase may warrant a discount.

Also learn and understand TCO - Total Cost of Ownership, that is the overall cost of the purchase (i.e. a PC in this case) including repairs / replacement components, down time due to failure - including the cost of have the employee unable to fully function at their job, plus cost in time & labour of IT staff for deployment (roll-out) including disk imaging (by vendor or IT), as well as overall satisfaction of the agency with the IT department's perceived value. This is standard IT management (CIO and below) knowledge, so talk to an intelligent IT manager for any help you need in this regard.

Unless you have scores of idle IT staff, assembling 1000 PCs is a lot of labour and time. And that's assuming you pick a hardware configuration that works, is stable, and is reliable. Most IT departments are staffed with strictly software oriented system administrators as their rank and file, with reasonably few if any computer hardware technicians and tools. And "at-home builders" experience don't cut it in a professional setting; it's a starting point for new hires, not a substitute for fully trained technicians. I'm sure that will cause flames, but I don't care, and to wit, I'm not a computer hardware technician, but I have respect for the few I have worked with, they were excellent at their job, and knew which end of the soldering iron to hold when making custom serial cables.

Get training on procurement process through whatever level of government you are with (e.g. US Federal, Ontario provincial, etc.). Then you will know what purchasing options are available. The problem is that many departments and agencies have cut their procurement & supply staff, and those remaining tend to be at best amateurs in their knowledge about IT purchases, and most IT departments staff avoid dull training like procurement, and thus their purchases are done in a very ad-hoc manner, and often reflect personal bias (like only buying from Dell).

In the USA, at the federal level the government U.S. General Services Administration runs a program GSA Advantage.

In Canada the federal government Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC) runs a Standing Offer Index including a specific one for microcomputers. For generic office PCs, these are starting points that are "pre-approved" purchases so you don't need to create and advertise and evaluate and have contested a RFQ (Request For Quotes), and as well the purchasers can also do LPO (local purchase offers) or RVD (Request Volume Discount) and likely other techniques I don't know of in particular if the Index is out of date, or a large volume purchase may warrant a discount.

Also learn and understand TCO - Total Cost of Ownership, that is the overall cost of the purchase (i.e. a PC in this case) including repairs / replacement components, down time due to failure - including the cost of have the employee unable to fully function at their job, plus cost in time & labour of IT staff for deployment (roll-out) including disk imaging (by vendor or IT), as well as overall satisfaction of the agency with the IT department's perceived value. This is standard IT management (CIO and below) knowledge, so talk to an intelligent IT manager for any help you need in this regard.

Unless you have scores of idle IT staff, assembling 1000 PCs is a lot of labour and time. And that's assuming you pick a hardware configuration that works, is stable, and is reliable. Most IT departments are staffed with strictly software oriented system administrators as their rank and file, with reasonably few if any computer hardware technicians and tools. And "at-home builders" experience don't cut it in a professional setting; it's a starting point for new hires, not a substitute for fully trained technicians. I'm sure that will cause flames, but I don't care, and to wit, I'm not a computer hardware technician, but I have respect for the few I have worked with, they were excellent at their job, and knew which end of the soldering iron to hold when making custom serial cables.

The thing with US Federal law though is that treaties override constitutional laws.

Well, then it's a good thing the OP was talking about Canada. Here in Canada, treaties are not law, and domestic law must be amended to fall in line with treaties. (citation). As such, in Canada, treaties have no legal force until domestic laws are implemented, and those laws are subject to the usual restrictions imposed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

>because I can give $5 to every person I talk to on a normal day and still not spend as much as I earn in that day.

That's very nice of you. However, most of us with above average jobs are earning, after taxes, $24,682.50 per person, or $49,365 per household (How to calculate: $67,600 applied to tax cacluator, $1 added to result, divided by two).

Average spending in Canada is listed here. If you remove the following optional components, along with taxes (as we are working with tax free money):

$3,975 - Recreation
$264 - Books
$1,157 - Education
$1,475 - Vices
$258 - Betting
$1,087 - Slush
$1,505 - Gifts
$13,634 - Taxes
-------
$23,355

$67,736 (total) - $23,355 (optional + taxes) = $44,381 required to live an average lifestyle without any optional needs.

$49,365 - $44,381 = $4,984 in excess money.

$4,984 - $600 (My guesstimate of a yearly cost of owning decent home theatre equipment, a computer, iPod, etc, including TV, sofa, DVD player, receiver) = $4,384 remaining.

So, lets suggest you like to listen to music in your 8 hours of "free time" a day (which an average person should have). 8 * 365 - (52 * 2 * 8) + (52 * 2 * 12) = 5,000 hours free time a year.

$1 per song, and you only have $4,384, and just the basics to live on. Even if you got an hour of playtime out of each song (that's as many as 20 plays for some songs), you will need to find another $616 to pay for it that year. I guess you will be spending plenty of time at the library as an average person.

But hey, warp your reality as you like. I base mine on hard stats. Clearly, you base yours on some crazy idea that people earn $100k+ a year, and those that don't are broke bums, which is provably false unless you want to present the ludicrous notion almost all people are broke bums.

Music is worth about $0.10 to $0.25 a song, at max. With those sort of number, it at least brings the cost into line with already overpriced/overvalued cable TV subscriptions.

Did you notice the shift? A couple of years ago they'd just shrug it off,

You mean this?

• Open Source Software, which is part of the "Federated Architecture Program" from Treasury Board of Canada.

Let's see there is a position paper, a FAQ, a list of open source providers (from Industry Canada), and resources from Public Works and Goverment Services resource entitled Software Acquisition Reference Centre.

It may not gather a lot of steam in terms of office desktops, too many MSCE-certified types are employed as Computer System Administrators, called "CS'es" because of the abbreviation of their job classification who are not experienced Linux administrators, but I think areas such as embedded systems, and servers, systems that don't have user's calling a helpdesk for technical support, are likely areas where the adoption over time is possible.

Presently groups tend to be isolated or have insightful, competent management willing to fight to their use Open Source / Free Software within the Government of Canada, but those are rare, internally led experiences, often from smaller, newer teams of people already with appropriate skills.

One side-effect is that if government adopts Open Source Software, it may change their closed culture of treating soft resources as scarce, and actually promote sharing within departments across geographical regions and groups, as well as inter-departmental sharing of resources, which could have a significant impact on reducing spending on custom development. Personally, I think the cultural changes of infusing Open Source could be vastly worth more than the lisense / CALs they would not have to buy.

One example is not accepting binary / executable only deliverables from an private-sector contractor, in an Open Source culture that appears insane and unsafe, but too often currently binary deliverables are used as leverage into a form of black-mail which makes the government department at the mercy of the contractor(s).

That's happening right now in British Columbia, Canada with the natural gas. The pipes are still owned by a company called Terasen, and the price of gas is set by the but you can choose to get the gas from one of many providers or stick with the company that owns the pipes.

However, Terasen is profit-neutral on the gas. They buy their gas in three month intervals from the suppliers, which means that if the price of gas goes up, they have to charge more to stay profit-neutral. The other companies however, can buy gas in bulk, and you can get 1 to 5 year fixed price agreements.

As an aside, I worked as a gas marketer for a few months last summer. It was kind of sad how many people just didn't see the benifit, even when I was able to show them how their natural gas costs have gone up a ridiculous amount in the past few years. From a pdf found through Google: "In 1995, the average annual price of natural gas at Sumas/Huntingdon and Station 2 was under $2.00/GJ; by 2003 the price was over $6.00/GJ, a threefold increase". And the price is just going to keep climbing over the next few years, thanks to natural gas being a non-renewable resource. It would have been nice to get a fixed rate contract back when natural gas was less than $2/GJ!

What I thought was really sad though, was how people 'had heard from a friend that works for Terasen' that the gas marketers were charging more than Terasen. But that's how a fixed rate plan works. The gas marketer gets a deal for several years, and fixes the price. Yes, for the first year, you might be paying more -- as much as $2 or $3 per gigajoule more -- but after that first year, you're saving lots of money. When I was out going door-to-door last summer, the price of gas from Terasen was about $5/GJ. Now ( as of October 1, 2008 ) the price is $7.536/GJ. The 3-year plan my company offered was something like $9/GJ. Now they have five year plans too. Next year, the price will probably be a few bucks more ( gas prices tend to fall a bit in the summer, then jump to a few bucks higher than the previous winter -- non-renewable resource and all that ).

And a lot of companies do this thing where at the end of your contract, if you choose to stay with them, your new contract will be the median between what you were paying and the current price of gas. So if you were on a contract for $10/GJ, and the price of gas had gone up to $16/GJ, you'd only pay $13/GJ on the new contract. Well, the company I worked for did anyways.

And yes, I know. I'm a horrible human being for working as a door-to-door salesman. I was paid on commission only though, and I had to quit after two months because I barely made enough money to pay for gas ( car gas, not natural gas ). So that job didn't totally corrupt my soul. That's what the internet is for!

Solar isn't competing against oil unless you a solar powered car. Solar power is competing against coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear for electricity generation.

Lots of people use heating oil for their homes, especially in the US. According to the Dept. of Energy, over 8 million of the 107 million homes in the US use heating oil (roughly 7.5%) and rougly 4.1% in Canada. Typically, they have to refill their tanks 4 to 5 times a year. Heating oil accounts for about 25% of the yield of a barrel of crude oil, the second largest "cut" after gasoline (petrol). With solar generated heat/power in place, heating oil would no longer be needed

Canadian speaking. Yes you are right that people will curse at socialized medicine as we do. Like recently when I got a booboo on my finger (stupid hammer) and the emergency room wait was about 2 hours. This is annoying, but not deadly. I've had serious emergencies (an internal organ which will remain nameless went haywire) and I was wheeled in real fast and had a team of very serious people looking at me within seconds. To me the latter is far far more significant than the former.

As for the war vs health care dichotomy, that is false. Canada spends less on health care than the US does, although the reasons for that are hard to summarize and are not simply the oft-mentioned reduced overhead that results from eliminating the insurance companies (ref). Whatever the exact explanation, if magically the US woke up tomorrow with Canada-style health care, overall costs would go down. No extra money from the war budget or anywhere else would be needed.

Of course, Canada has it's share of bureaucratic nightmare government programs, but health care seems, for some reason, to be reasonably well run as such things go. It's probably because the people take the system personally and keep up the pressure on the politicians to deliver a workable system. In the wake of Katrina I suppose Americans are disinclined to believe such a thing is possible.

I don't think you could convince me that there isn't any fat to be trimmed out of the healthcare system, either.

Personally, I'm trying like hell to keep a system like your Canadian Socialized Medicine out of my country (the good ol' USA), so it doesn't bankrupt us. Don't want to make the downfall of our Government take place any faster than it already is!

You couldn't convince me, either. I'm sure there is tons of fat to be trimmed out of the Canadian healthcare system. This is true of any large institution.

But there is way way more to be trimmed out of private healthcare. Why wouldn't there be, when you need to replicate an entirely separate organizational infrastructure for each HMO?

The best demonstration of this is the fact that Canadians pay less per GDP than Americans on health care.

Think about all the paper-pushers you don't have to hire with a single unified system! Think about how much doctors make per hour, and think about how much you're saving when these doctors don't have to take the time to figure out the precise levels of coverage from the patient's specific HMO, determine the best treatment for their budget and plan, and navigate some weird HMO-specific form! Instead you have a consistent level of coverage for everything and a standardized process for all patients. Lastly, think about the virtue of preventative maintenance. Comprehensive coverage means people can get that ache or pain treated that would lead to something serious.

The public system is my heritage as a Canadian and all us Canadians obviously hear a lot of chest-thumping by our politicians and others about its superiority. I have never had to pull out my credit card at a hospital, and I don't know what the American system is really like.

I also believe that capitalistic competition has a great deal of benefit most of the time. But with the arguments above, even after all my disclaimers, I can't possibly see how the private system could be defended except out of ignorance or a misplaced faith in competition being a good thing always.