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US Army Signs $471,000,000 Deal for Microsoft Software
zero_offset writes "According to this article at Yahoo, Microsoft will provide software for 494,000 Army computers during the next six years. At roughly $950 per computer this clearly involves more than just the OS, although the article unfortunately doesn't provide details, and I was unable to find any references to this on the Microsoft website." The great things about this deal: the Army is going through a reseller, when clearly they have the purchasing power to buy direct; and most of the computers they purchase are normal consumer machines which will be purchased with Windows and Office already installed, so the Army will be paying twice for each machine.
US Army Signs $471,000,000 Deal for Microsoft Software
And if the US was a country that didn't pander to corperate intrests, the headline would read,
"US Army Signs $0 Deal for Linux Software"
http://use.perl.org
So now, "being all that you can be" includes being frustrated and riddled with crashes? Oh, wait, that's the old slogan. Won't someone please think of our TROOPS???!?!
everything in moderation
story. Does anyone think that there should be a greater reason to post stories here than as an opportunity for 300 comments dissing MS? Sigh, let the bitching begin...
Insert $1000 toilet seat joke here-->
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
Before you all start griping, just remember... This is almost 1/2 a trillion dollars that won't be spent on "smart" bombs. Although I am not for the us military in general, I am all about it wasting it's money. Each $ wasted could be a life saved.
the world will be in safe. Didn't Microsoft commit itself to security?
Does this price include working out the bugs and making everything work correctly? The last thing we need is the blue screen of death in the battle field. (fp)
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Just goes to show how powerful lobbyists are. Well at least this levels the playing field a bit on the world military scale ... stop an M1 Abrams with KLEZ
I can't believe they would waste tax dollars like that. But, I guess if your budget is that big, and you will lose that money if you don't spend it, why not just buy lots of computers that will be obsolete in a couple years, instead of figuring out a better plan to upgrade the machines later with better parts.
The upcoming Cyberwarfare! At $950/machine, do you think each will come with IIS installed? Talk about ecurity!
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
"so the Army will be paying twice for each machine"
/. is slanted. It still irritates me though.
I RTFA and I saw NO reference to anyone paying twice. The article does not state this deal is for the OS and office, so you, Michael, should not assume anyone is paying twice.
I know, I know. NO, I am not new here. Yes, I know
Holy s-, it's Jesus!
Thank you, whoever made that decision. Now, $450million of OUR taxpayer dollars are going to pay for a crappy defective OS with inherent security flaws, and we're going to be forced to upgrade on MS' schedule.
MY tax dollars should not be spent on proprietary software.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
you can't really claim to know that they are paying twice for each machine. With a deal that large they are not going to be so naive with what they are buying. Government spending may be out of control but you cannot tell us that the military is doing something so stupid that you or I or any /. reader could figure out.
/. *sigh*
In fact the military offers many tech positions and training opportunities and uses highly advanced technology on a day to day basis. The military in the US is one of the few large government institutions that embraces technology and its benefits.
This is just clearly posted so that people can rip on MS and the large sum of money going to them. Typical
-Anonymoose
Commander: We need to go into battle now!
Officer: We first need to access our plans, but Word froze up with "reactivate your software now"
Commander: Oh great. What can we do?
Officer: Nothing. Congress passed a bill allowing copyright holders to seek injunctions against the army for violating the DMCA. We have to reactivate.
Commander: But the enemy is jamming our cell phone signals!
Officer: I guess we have to surrender.
From the article:
:)
Charles Di Bona, software analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said in a research report that the contract would most likely add $16.6 million per quarter of "high-margin (in the range of 89 percent) revenues and add $0.001 per quarter to EPS."
What products make M$ *that* much profit? Windows and Office of course.
Let's see...if the Army is paying full retail (which I wouldn't doubt):
Microsoft Windows XP Professional: $299
Microsoft Office XP Professional: $449
Microsoft Visio Standard: $199
Total: $947
There's most likely your answer.
(Also, I happen to know that Visio Standard comes on the Army's standard build (a friend of mine worked for TACOM), so that's why picked it
My journal has hot
has new meaning. one word stupid
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
Keith Hodson, a Microsoft spokesman, said the contract could help the Army reduce its costs and "validates the Army's belief in our security model."
It's also commonly known that the US Army (the US Military in General) isn't well known for spending its money wisely.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
This is the new version of $600 toliet seats..
from the same organization that brought us $100 toilet seats and $500 hammers.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
They aren't a business. They can't afford to code up every little thing when they need it and they need to know that they can depend on somebody else to fix any problems that might come up. It's a variant of the "Who do you sue" problem. Microsoft's stuff is easily usable and ultimately gets the job done, which lets them focus on what's important.
I'd hate to think that our fighting forces are futzing around for weeks on end trying to figure out how to get fonts to anti-alias, let alone getting the whole "enterprise" to work. Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Professional streamline enterprise activities.
like the Army is paying for Microsoft's fine...
Justice Department: Bad Microsoft.. you must pay $500 million and promise to never do it again.
Defense Deparment: Here Microsoft.. $471 million for you...
Right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing? Or does it?
$471,000,000 dollars? That's like SIXTEEN hammers!
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Fist of death!
-- taking over the world, we are.
How exactly does spending $471 million reduce costs? I'm not sure who's more delusional, the US Army or Microsoft.
Is thit any surprise from an organization that's lost 2 trillion dollars over the past 10 years? What is this, some kind of super-mafia or something?
"Spend as much as you can."
Point is, the Army is not out to save money. Buying direct is a no-no. This way, they can as for more money next year.
A friend of mine worked as an Army Core Engineer and he once told me they spend $2000 on a box of hammers.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Can we actually assume that the base OS is actually included in the $900+/comp. price? I think it's a little premature to assume so. Something not mentioned though is that this probably covers OS and software upgrades which can be expensive potentially
I wonder if this basically is some sort of site license for all MS products for the Army.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
The deal $970 per seat includes OS, Exchange, SQL, and Office so that's about right.
t military25.html
The article also says the US military seems to think Microsofts security problems were not significant enough to stop the deal.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/128059_msf
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Join the army and learn windows!!!
Microsoft can finally sell BOB(Bombs over Baghdad) to someone!
Losers whine about doing their best
Winners go home and f*ck the prom queen!
I would have thought that they could have their own software and operating system developed for them.
After all some work has already been done by the NSA on SEC Linux, why not capitalise on the outrageous amount of quality free software and plough some tax payers money into employing skilled linux and unix professionals to bring everything up to your desired spec.
Then you can do whatever you want with it and don't have to pay any more licences.
Good decision. It's nice to see that bigger organisations getting normal again and use software that works, costs money and which is proven to be some sort of industry standards. The ARMY secures a lot of peoples employment by this decision. They can work on software, earn money, sell the software for a good price, knowing that they can feed their kids with the money they take home every month..
I am an open source developer and it sucks working the hell out on professional software without getting paid for the shit I am doing. Not that I don't get paid I also need to deal with a lot of complaining and ranting faggots all the time.
Open Source is killing legitimate work of professionals, software engineers and those who need to feed their kids with the money they earn each month. Open Source means that the company can't make any serious money and thus can't even pay their employees.
My friend did some contract work for the Army a few months back. They needed a pair of IBM RS/6000 P-series 660s, fully loaded, attached to a pair of FastT700 fibrechannel arrays. Close to $1M worth of hardware, by my rough estimates, having purchased similar hardware in the past.
This was for a workgroup of 30 people.
Government contracts are the best.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Army Intelligence.
A contradiction in terms.
'Nuff said.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
What...are you FUCKING kidding? This is basically worst-case scenario when it comes to security. Anybody remember M$ offering their source to China? Hello, McFly?
The U.S. government is investing aggressively in technology as part of its war on terror and focus on national security.
Of course they are....everything comes back to 9/11, right?!
The six-year deal, which also involved a software reseller called Softmart that will get a commission
Somebody...find out which congressman/senator's wife/retired general has a major stake in Softmart. There's got to be collusion SOMEWHERE. This move is too boneheaded and expensive for this not to be an insider deal.
although....
Anybody know if any of these costs include all the immense testing, or paperwork, or the percentage that gets siphoned off for black projects?
I'm not being snide about that last one...a percentage of all projects goes into black projects..that's how they fund the Skunkworks, after all.
Microsoft is not a minority owner company. I'm curious to know if the "reseller" is listed as one.
If it is, that's why the Army *HAD* to use a reseller.
I was thinking, "Wow! Bill finally sold!"
And then, "Hmmm. They'll probably be enforcing those EULAs with an SKS muzzle in your mouth, now."
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
no no no no no no. A cash cow is a mature product that you "milk", selling it for a nice flow of profits while spending a minimum amount on R&D to improve it. Windows, Office, and Microsoft's other monopoly products are cash cows. So the government is supporting Microsoft's cash cows, not it's own. And the Bush administration is supporting one of it's campaign contributors.
What are the government's cash cows.? We taxpayers. Mooooo! Like it?
the article says 471 Million bucks. Which is nuts, but reasonable. The base post by michael says 471 BILLION bucks ! That's nuts too, but unreasonable.
---- ---- --- -- --- ------ Keep Cool But Do Not Freeze
Pretty sad that our military wastes extreme amounts of money on computer systems that they know they will have to upgrade shortly (more $$$, no jobs), will keep them open to the threat of widespread viruses (more $$$, no new jobs), and contains code that they can not see (no new jobs). This is fucking sad, man.
Says it all, doesn't it?
Maybe some paid spokesman for industry telling them "If you use Open BSD you'll be helping the terrorists!"
The world is getting to be an ubsurd place. Be nice to move to the mountains or something away from the all these greedy, pawing sociopaths.
Exactly how many computers is that/soldier?
More then one I'd bet. Why?
" Keith Hodson, a Microsoft spokesman, said the contract could help the Army reduce its costs and "validates the Army's belief in our security model.""
I guess the Iraqi information minister's initials being M.S. isn't a coincidence then - he appears to work for them
While the cost of microsoft products, retail or OEM is substantially higher than Open Source alternatives, there is a consideration that is not addressed by that cost: Training.
Most of the kids going into the army have some experience with computers: computers running Windows. The more familiar new recruits are with Army technology the less training will be required and the less time/resources/money need to be invested in getting newly enlisted GIs up to speed. The military is like a business in many ways. They write memos, reports, letters, make spreadsheets and send email. The most efficient way of getting all personel on the same page technologically is to deploy the "lowest common denominator". That is to say, software that is good enough and easy enough to use.
This may be impressive, but Linux has the City of Largo, FL. Eat it, MS!
If you are concerned with job creation, Microsoft is the wrong company to give money to. First of all, Microsoft needs much fewer employees than other industries to generate each $1m in revenue. In addition, since these are probably sales of existing software, there will be almost no job creation from those sales at all. Furthermore, Microsoft has a lot of its jobs overseas, so much of Microsoft's already measly job creation doesn't even take place in the US.
the whole point is to subsidise US companies,(MS, BOING etc) and thus the US economy, through taxpayers money. This is the reason why US "defense" spending is so high. And then, when you have all these toys to play with, you have to give them a playing field...or two...
I bet this money only include the OS and M$ Office... the money will be laundered somehow and end up on a military project we don't know about...
Didn't they get caught paying 95$ for a screw a few years back?
although the article unfortunately doesn't provide details
My suspicion is that there are enough details left out that the author and editor could print an alarmist article.
Further suspicion is that there are MANY MORE aspects of this contract tha have been conveniently, or ignorantly, omitted.
Little things, like perhaps Smartsoft has the better GSA rate for MS software than MS itself does? Maybe Smartsoft underbid their supplier and is providing professional services in addition to the software? Who knows, since no link to the contract award is provided and no refrence to what sort of purchase this "story" is referring, or avoiding to refer.
You guys see this all the time with the $2B/aircraft stories, that conveniently leave out all of the special tools and other pricy items that come along with each Squadron delivered with only the "journalist" obscuring the real cost of the airplane since those costs are published buy the GAO with regularity. How is this any different or even news?
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
News.com story.
Of course, IBM is actually selling services for the most part... when the Army's microcrap starts deteriorating, Microsoft probably won't answer the phone.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
What they do: Lock the Army into a sweetheart contract that drains resources and supplies them with the most hackable, insecure, bloated OS available bar none.
Holy crap.
It's things like this that make me glad I live in Canada.
That's like our whole military budget right there...
Another reason to oppose US's "war on terror", which is just a war on every country not doing business with the US companies.
We don't need no stinking computers! All of our equipment is 60's vintage with add-on computers. So when the ECM hits, they can just revert to manual operation.
---
Well actualy corporate america is by no means US's cash cow. Do you know why? because they dont pay taxes. Thats right you read it right. The biggest american coorporations dont pay taxes. Thats what an army of lawyers can achieve. It isnt hard to guess who pays the taxes for them...
Sit down, take a beer and... take another beer!
and I'll employee some! out of work programmers and designers to work on GNU/Linux, we could even consult with the army to make the software better for them.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
It's still OUR 400 million dollars. We could have gotten the same thing for much much less, if a FS/OSS solution had been used.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Since US is pretty much joined with Canada at the hip they could have put a little of that wasted money into the Canadian Military... If a Country ever decided to attack Canada we might as well give up and start offering our attackers Tim Hortons Coffee... we might be good for peace keeping...but we have no defense...Missles coming over Canada from other countries would fly right by...I doubt we would even try and shoot them down.
Love your country, support M$. Use Linux, be a terrorist. Time to write you Senator NOW!
there's no place like ~
$200m on Linux systems? That seems a bit high, don't you think?
$953/computer / 6 years = $158 per year.
If this includes SQL, etc, all future releases, its likely a good deal as far as MS licensing costs go.
They want all their recruits to train on the best computer simulation available to the government today.
That sure is one expensive toilet seat.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Just wait until while in the middle of cordinating an attack, they recieve a windows messanger popup for increased penis size.
Priceless!
http://use.perl.org
Unfortunantly it seems like whenever a group is getting government funding they feel like they have to spend ALL the money. If they don't spend it all whoever gave it to them isn't going to give them as much next time. I think that is what causes a lot of the senseless waste in government, and could be the culprit here as well.
Isn't it great? 40% of my salary is going for Microsofot software! Awesome.
"B S O D in the Army~~~"
Sorry, someone had to. (yeah, the syllables don't match up...)
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
Someone has made a nice commission on this sale.
Even ignoring OSS alternatives, the high unit price means a fat profit for a dealer somewhere.
Bet you a dollar there is a slice of this going back to whoever OK'd the contract. Generals gotta pay for the servants too, y'know!
(Actually, that is not true. One good thing about being a General is that you get all the slave labour you could want.)
Ceci n'est pas une signature
"what, you think they really paid $700 for a hammer?"--judd hirsh, independence day.
How do you rocket scientists even know that $$ is for an OS or any existing Microsoft product. Maybe they're developing specific software for the Army.
So that company called Microsoft doesn't improve the wealth of the nation? Wow. And I thought that flood of money coming in from around the world might seep into the US economy some how.
You're going to tell me that Microsoft keeps all its money in Swiss bank accounts now too, and only employees people from China.
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â¦for the Army that features a 3D minesweeper and special screen saver that displays over-priced toilet seats.
All the way across the pacific..
China is probably laughing thier ass off right now.. I can imagine north korea is doin the same..
Being as china is moving toward their very own linux, and it's most likely pretty secure at that.. how many coders will it take to crash the US armed forces.. few highschool kids tops.. woohoo..
I wonder what kinda deal norton antivirus is getting from the military next week? Time to buy some symantec stock!
The US Army and their Xbox's vs Saddam and his PS2's
This gives a whole new meaning to console wars.
This must be a slow news day, huh?
Who should they be buying their computers from? Apple? Oh wait that would make them PANDERING TO A CORPORATE INTEREST.
Wake up idiots. The US govt buys things from business like everyone else. They just do it 100x as bad as a typical consumer.
Fighting the enemy outside and embracing the one inside?
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
Hehe - I'm enjoying this soap opera - keep it coming ;)
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When a large entity pays that much for software, it's not so much paying for the software itself, it's the support that comes with it. I know everyone's going to crack on MS support, but when it comes to the government, or other very large contracts like this, they will have MS at their beck and call. If something breaks, it WILL be fixed, in a very short amount of time. That's why the goverment goes with commercial products, rather than open source or limited distrobution products.
Keith Hodson, a Microsoft spokesman, said the contract could help the Army reduce its costs and "validates the Army's belief in our security model."
I can't wait to see this. I'm not sure if the Army will be significant enough pressure to make m$ security better. In fact, they're a small piece in the bigger pie.
While this is probably cheaper than the defense departments $300 toilet seat vendors (hey, they probably at least had a backup toilet seat tho), it doesn't make too much sense to me. I'm reminded of the Navy vessel that crashed running NT.
Given that XP is still having issues with updates and such, I'm wondering what the Army was thinking. But then again, that is often the case..
...$471M is an awful lot of money for a few CDs.
Perhaps someone should ask their congress-critter to find out if this contact went to public tender and if not, why not?
Instead, the DoD is at the mercy of some large corporation, obligated to spend 1/2 billion in a few years to patch all the bugs.
What a waste.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Has anybody thought how complicated it'd be if Microsoft wanted to to audit the Army's compliance?
I don't know any company (other than small businesses) who don't do their bulk shopping through general (crappy) vendors. My company has been using HP for years, they're "standardized", just because one will have a FIC motherboard and the next will have an MSI mother etc. etc. etc.
Then there is the "site license" thing which cuts down on system administration but implies that two licenses are being purchased for every machine.
What has bugged me in the past is when I needed a linux machine, we HAD to purchase the crappy HP AND just tossed the M$ license out the window. Fortunately the machine had one of those pretty license stickers on the side so WHEN the BSA comes, we can say "See, it has a license, it's not running windows but it has a license. Can we get away with just paying $10,000 for the violation?"
Whee.
(AP) "In addition to the payment, Microsoft is expected to get exclusive usage rights to several Borg cube prototypes currently being constructed by Army personnel"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I guess there's an Ada# around the corner, now that M$ has a foot in the army. C# meets Schwarzkopf... surely a macho language!
About one computer per soldier, since total personnel in 4/2002 was 481,266. Given the typical astronomical support to combat troop ratio, that's not huge at all.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
...reboot per day. At least the rifles aren't running Windows yet.
You mean the Pentagon.
Officer: Sarg, launch the damn missile son, nuke their ass....
Sarg: Duuh, do we have to restart after each missile Sir
Officer: You didnt restart the last time??????
Sarg: Duhhh,Naaah sir i didnt...It says abort retry ignore, duuuuh which one Sir....
KABOOOOMMMMMMM.
The lunatic is in my head
next slammer virus stops the US army dead on its way to Tehran.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
This is cant be just a software deal. The Army has to replace the existing (i'm assumption) 490,000 desktop hardware if any Microsoft's lastest (or the next three year version)software has to run on it.
if its a Hardware deal as well, where is the Headlines on DELL/IBM/HP bagging multi million dollar Army deal!
Again Linux is not ready for the desktop. If your average 'grunt' can't be expected to use it neither can the rest of population.
Also the TCO comes into question. You would need to retrain thousands of troops in an army that it is already overstretched by defending the free world.
Why, you are silly. Indirectly you pay for this with your taxes. You are supporting a huge corporation that truly has no need of government handouts.
Congratulations.
In related news, the US has dropped millions of computers off to terrorist hot-spots.
Military Analyists estimate Bin Laden will be bankrupted by the additional fees within 3 years.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
From what i remember the army was looking into and to some extent using OSS.
I wonder what effect the SCO mess had on this decision, if any.
Either way its another setback. Every large purchase of commercial ( regardless of whos ) software ties up that entity with the software for a while, until its depreciated out..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
i'm in the army. much of our computers are still running windows NT and crashes constantly. only within the last year or so i've started seeing some Dell computers with Windows 2000 and XP in a few Army offices. flat panel monitors are popping up a lot too.
so getting new hardware, OS's and Office Software is a good thing. yes we probably are paying twice as much or more than we need to, but thats normal and expected, and it's your tax money anyways. it's something that needs to be done, yes it can be done better, but at least it's happening. and for the linux people, we probably don't use it because of it's complexity, and the fact that they don't teach us it, and the fact that many people in the military are there cause they couldn't make it in the real world, therefore not being bright enough to learn it. and not to mention the old higher ranking people who make the decisions, they definately don't care to learn linux.
They are just going to contract out people to work on their computers anyway, so it's not like the actual troops are going to be doing much work on them.
I am contracted out to the Air Force to convert one of their COBOL systems to Java. Sure, they allocate blue-suits to program, but the contractors are doing all the work. The airmen mostly sit and read online comics all day and talk about their fast-and-furious cars.
And they pay my company a pretty penny for me to write their software. Around $115/hour to be more precise. It only takes about 25% of that to cover my salary. There's where your tax $$ are going.
And there's a good chance this project won't even deploy. Stupid.
tomstdenis = Pr0nboy, maybe?
Of course, Pr0nboy has been posting as AC, but I have ways of knowing...
Well, that's great. (1) Government requires purchased OS's to adhere to new set of standards called POSIX. (2) UNIX vendors jump through hoops for a decade or more to develop and meet the standards. (3) Government buys MS instead.
Just because they have a deal with PC vendors that sell hardware with the software pre-installed, doesn't mean they're paying twice for it. An organization as a large as the military will probably have an EA in place. Under these EA-type agreements, said orgainization can designate one or more companies as its EA license provider. Dell, CDW, and others mentioned in the article are all certified Microsoft resellers. The software "sold" to the customer from these hardware vendor is then licensed under the purchaser's EA. QED
I wonder if this may be somehow tied to an audit. I remember reading articles a couple year ago regarding Microsoft auditing companies and strong-arming them to buy more licenses to cover the accountability.
For 494,000 computers, I doubt the Army was able to keep track of every single on of its licenses. This may be a convenient way for both sides to look good. Army "consolidates" its IT purchasing, and MS gets a large government press release.
For that kind of money, they could have bought a new G5!
There using the cds for target practice, apparently the army thinks that well be better for combat if we use more expensive equiptment.
It's inferred. The FCW article said that some PC's would be purchsed from Dell. So it's assumed that these are going to be Dell's regular PC's that (At least at one point) were required to ship with a copy of Windows.
I would say it's possible that Windows is paid for twice, but unlikely that Office will be.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
It's good to see the Govenment spending money to spur the economy!
All your base are belong to MS.
Army's Apple Shines in the Desert
We all do remember what happened to the USS Yorktown in 1998, yes?
I just made a post on you paying for this with your taxes, and now realise that the biggest, by far the biggest iraony in this "deal" is that Microsoft gets tax breaks like there's no tomorrow.
/. about the bias here, because those very same people fail to see the irony in paying for this deal indirectly with their taxes, and this to a company that hasn't exactly been paying huge dollops of taxes on it's yearly multi billion income.
I read with humour, the angry pro MS crowd who regularly vent their anger here on
If your country ever does collapse, it will be because you have a government that thinks it can generate money from thin air, very much like the horde of dotbomb failures did.
Well it is good to see that Rumsfeild is doing what he said he would do...save the Army from itself and save us taxpayers from the Army!
--"Life's a virgin, a bitch is too easy"--
Perhaps the Army could get some Ad placement in Windows to offset the cost. "This Blue Screen of Death is brought to you by the US Army!"
I'm sure that someone, somewhere will tout this incredible misappropriation of our hard-earned American tax dollas as another "economic stimulus package".
Yeah, it works so well that the glorious US army is attacking one weak country on the verge of self implosion after the other instead of going after someone who can defend himself, like, for example, uh, North Korea?
I suggest you read this Wired article to see how well it works. They are using Microsoft Chat on the battlefield, for crying out loud! Yes, the one with the comic characters, where the staff seargant looks like a big breasted bimbo. Nothing inspired a feeling of technical superiority like that, if you ask me.
At least the important systems run Linux.
That sounds fishy. Will we find some accounting "issues" in a few years? Why would you buy $1/2 B via a reseller? There's something behind this. I think someone's getting a retirement plan setup...
-- Leeeter than leet
They're buying Windows from Micros~1 because the pre-loaded install of Windows could be tainted. The PC manufacturer or one of their employees could have loaded keystroke logging software, etc.
It's a shame that the Army can't buy machines without Windows, and not pay Micros~1 twice, but there's no way MS would let that happen.
It could be worse though... Imagine being one of the guys that needs to reinstall Win XP on 494,000 machines.
Common sense is not so common.
that the tax dollars are put to efficient use.
mod parent up
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
"The great things about this deal: the Army is going through a reseller, when clearly they have the purchasing power to buy direct; and most of the computers they purchase are normal consumer machines which will be purchased with Windows and Office already installed, so the Army will be paying twice for each machine."
There, Michael, I just took your smart-assed thoughts about the story submission and posted them as a Comment in response to the story. Is that so hard? I mean, it's what us common folk have to do all the time if we have something to say about a story. We don't have the luxury of forcing everyone else to read our comments without the ability to mod them up or down.
You're an ass and you continually abuse your article posting privileges. And since you also have unlimited mod points, I expect you'll abuse them too and mod me down for pointing your abuses out.
Look at the their cash balances. They spend a lot of it, no doubt, but software, especially the business Microsoft is in, is a high margin business... they do pretty well on each copy of Office and Windows they sell.
As for the money Microsoft spends, they do lobby in other countries, offer discounts to foreign governments considering open source legislation. I wouldn't be surprised to see that they do redirect some of the cash they make out of the country.
politics, food, music, life: FatMixx
What does this 'six year' figure mean? Does it mean they will buy all the computers now, and MS will support them for six years? Or does it mean that they are committing to this platform for six years? I'd guess the later, since current MS licensing practice tends to compell upgrades.
This practice basically amounts to selling vaporware. What will MS be putting on Army computers five years from now? Who knows? Nobody. Microsoft doesn't even know.
Personally, I'm more than a little apprehensive about Microsoft's future plans. DRM everywhere, for example. Yippie, the Army will be generating buttloads of documents that they will never be able to use without indefinately continuing to license Microsoft software. Of all the organizations in the world, you'd think the US military would be a little more concerned about being so vulnerable.
The army and Microsoft, together in perpetuity. Great.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
the contact does include more then the OS. i believe it includes Office and SQL server. could also include Exchange server.
:)
yeah we've been trying to get linux going over here but they don't listen unless it's got a MS at the beginning of it. i'd bet you they'd switch to MS Linux.
and I'm looking at my radar, oops BSOD. No prob, I'm a good pilot, I can fly this baby where it needs to go without radar, after all it's just a patrol, we're not attacking anything right now. Then I try to adjust my course, oops, I nearly forgot fly by wire, no cable and pulleys anymore, it's all fiber optic and pumped right through that blue screened computer. Hmm this is begining to look bad. Those MS reps assured the engineers that there was no reason to leave a reset button acessible to the cock pit, heck it would be dangerous if a pilot accidently hit the PC reset button in the heat of battle, so they chose not to leave me one. Time to radio for help. Oh yeah, voice encryption now, guess what encrypts my voice? Hmm, maybe if I can cut the power, damn, that panels in the back. I'm running out of options here, good thing the engines still running since the reaction was already started. Lets see, toggles, hmm, nope, I know what all of these do, none of them will cut power to the computer systems. Looks like I'm going to have to eject. *pulls canopy release*. Dammit! The canopy release is manual, but I'll be damned if they didn't make the actual seat ejection computer controlled, now I'm 12,000 feet up, traveling at 800MPH, freezing my balls off, and theirs nothing I can do about it! Thank you Microsoft, I'll show you where you can go today! Let's see, there's got to be some way out of this. I can't just jump, to fast, to high, and I'm not even sure if their's ocean under me anymore. Maybe I can get the chute off of the seat? Dammit, rivited on. Damn it's cold. Whats this? Blowing the canopy must have cut the power to the computer! Thank God the switch was broke, it's coming back up now! I'm saved, maybe I will be able to land this thing. *watches computer boot on Radar display* Looks at screen, push CTRL+ALT+DEL to log in. Dammit, how am I supposed to do that? Is there a keyboard up here? Damn it's cold. *try stick* Alright! The fly by wire program runs as a service! I didn't have to log in. Okay, it still says hit ctrl+alt+del, lets see, *lifts up console panel, finds a small cash register sized keyboard* BINGO! You know hard it is to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL at 800MPH FREEZING COLD? Good, username and domain already in, lets see, I don't know the password to this. Lets try a couple.
gotohellbill, nope not that one
armyofone, nope, that didn't work eaither
militaryisminenow, hey what do you know? That was it.
*Watches windows start through ice on screen*
Damn, how much crap do they have in the start up group? Hey look, the radar program is beging to load, oh whats this loading behind it? MS ejection seat monitor?
*pilot ejected from plane without warning*
The pilot lands on a backwoods farm owned by a real old fashioned hillbilly who forces him to marry his buck toothed daughter at at shotgun wedding, he doesn't know for sure but he thinks that their pilot had to much fun with Daisy Mae. The F16 continues under it's own power until it crashes into the Chinese embassy in Canada. This of course starts a war between the Canadians and the Chinese, the Canadians figure out that we are responsible and finally convince the Chinese of the same. WW3 begins, the bloodiest war of all time. The pilot and Daisy Mae live happily ever after with a bunch of Mullet headed kids, they're so far back they don't even know about the war.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
to get a bit of a discount...
MS has made the leap to cherished company, like MacDonnell-Douglas. Even if Linux or OS X was to smash Windows on the desktop, MS won't go down. They will recieve 'maintenence contracts' to stay afloat, so that in times of need, production of Windows CDs can be ramped up for wartime.
MS can now claim 'National Security' anytime there is call for opening up an API, or documentation on a Windows function.
Am I being sarcastic, or amazingly phophetic?
Thats the next frontier of e-voting.. machines dont take bribes.. After all, what do they contribute? Lies, sweetheart deals for the ultra-rich and megacorporations like Enron, with our money. The US military budget is the biggest gravy train that ever existed. And it is loaded with pork..individual politicos pet projects, often ones that don't make sense from a common-sense viewpoint. (but which do help important politicians constituencies, or, fantasies of world domination) Like this recent mini-nuke deal, which was basically welfare for the weapons labs because we already have enough mini-nukes (I heard that we were making them till 1993) to last us several world wars over..IMO we don't need to make new ones for quite a while.. Or the 'missile defense' program.. trillions for a technology before it has been demonstrated that it even works. In fact, repeatedly, it has been demonstrated that it doesnt work. See http://www.fas.org. And now the right-wing goons at the American Enterprise Institute want to outlaw NGOs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU! See http://www.presentdanger.org/commentary/2003/0306a ntingo.html
No wonder Bush was so hot to get into office even when he lost by > 600,000 votes. Can't let that happen..he and his friends might have to get real jobs for once in their lives..
BTW, did you know that last year, Microsoft was one of the biggest contributors to the Republican party?
Bend over, America!
Oh wait, that's already been done.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
Anything that reduces the US Military's finances, stability and general flexibility/readiness without actually spilling blood can only be good.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Any person can request a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) on this bid. You can see what companies bid, how much each bid, as well as all the proposal documentation. Its all in public domain. Now the trick is to find the contract number or the contracting officer so that you can contact the proper person.
Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt --Abraham Lincoln
Finally someone has come to reason and find a way to destroy the most powerful army in the world: BY USING WINDOWS!!!!!!
The only thing about that we won't have to worry anymore is that the US Army won't have time to take countermeassure attacks since they would be occupied restarting the servers and PC's because of Windows beautiful BOD Screens...
The green-screen applications of yesteryear were bulletproof compared to those run on PCs.
I often ask myself how much productivity has been wasted in the computing world over the last one and a half decades by making software use GUI's that neither add anything to the usabilty of the software nor make it any more stable.
If they really wanted to, they could get 0 day deal from Kazaa.
I went to battle MC Escher but drew a blank
The Submitter: At roughly $950 per computer this clearly involves more than just the OS, although the article unfortunately doesn't provide details, and I was unable to find any references to this on the Microsoft website.
Michael:
Did Michael not even bother reading what was submitted? The cash isn't for the OS. So the army isn't paying twice for the OS. You may assume that part of the money is going towards the OS but since no details have been released, making that assumption is just slanting the story to fit your particular political view of the situation - which is not what a journalist should do in reporting news.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Could the army save a ton of money if they used OSS? Yes. But while the Army is in many ways like a business, it isn't a business. One disadvantage that the Army has is that it can't attract the necessary personnel within itself to maintain a large Linux network. This is a misconception, though. All the money that they saved could have been diverted to services and maintenance had they wished.
Some people here have raised the spectre of cost, accountability, and reliability of maintenance. But how much will the Army pay for support of 400,000+ computers? As for accountability and reliability, I would think that a company like IBM is more than up to the challenge of maintaining this network.
Security-wise we all know this might be disastrous. Not only is it going to be desktops but servers as well. Like I said, on the surface it seemed like a good deal.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It doesn't matter how big you are, you buy MS software through a reseller. MS sets the discount level, but doesn't handle the actual sales.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I used to work as a contractor for the US Dept. of Energy, and the policy at the time was to try and buy as much PC crap through PC resellers, particularly "disadvantaged" (Small, Local, Minority/Woman owned) because the government has purchasing quotas for those types of businesses and since they buy a lot of PCs and PC software this is an easy way to do it. It wasn't an issue of having the purchasing power to buy directly from the manufacturer, as we clearly did have it.
In other news...
The canadian army made a deal with Apple worth 3,119USD to buy one OS X license and one G5.
Before you get on the Army for not buying Linux or doing something Free, consider this.
In my unit (B Co. 1/509th Abn.) we have I think 7 systems. They all run Windows 2000 and are connected to a network, through which we can access printers, other systems, and the Internet. You would be *amazed* at how many people come in a day with problems printing, getting the Internet to work, or just getting a certain program to run. You want infantrymen who at least have some familiarty with office and windows to try learning bash or mutt? It's all we can do to get all the systems functioning properly, with everyone remembering their passwords and able to get there damned email and print. If the Army mandated Linux, there would be a 4 week training program, after which chaos would ensue because 90% of the people still didn't understand it.
Your talking about people who have trouble checking email. Asking infantrymen to run linux as part of their work would be ludicrous at this point.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
Dell will and does sell computers without an OS to businesses. I wanted my laptop without an OS, but they wouldn't do it unless I was a business and buying lots of them.
I'm a soldier in Army Reserve and my unit is an administrative unit, which means that we make heavy use of our computers. The computers are mainly used for typing memos, making simple spreadsheets, and downloading new forms and publications off of the Internet. I do not see why a Linux or BSD machines running Open Office, Mozilla, and xPDF (or Reader for UNIX) cannot replace the current Windows machines. I have talked to soldiers that came from other reserve and active duty units and they also use their computers for similar purposes. Only software that we use that is not on Linux is FormFlow, which is one of the crapiest software I've used (yes, even worse than Windows ME). It is a simple software, so it shouldn't cost much to program something like that for non-Windows platform.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Softmart
At least it might be funny to watch when the relationship turns sour. A fleet of Army tanks invading Redmond to search for Software of Mass Destuction (SMDs) would be funny to watch.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Is that a hidden way that the U.S. government is using to pay Microsoft for the unpatched security holes in Internet Explorer?
Keynes said that if the economy is in the dumper, one way to get the economy moving again is by the government spending money (that people with capital don't want to invest). FDR tried this during the Depression but there was enormous resistance by the wealthy to the socialistic programs - then WWII came about and government spending went to the then nascent armaments industry - which had less resistance from the wealthy, since it was coming directly from them. Since WWII, a lot of money has been pumped into the economy through the defense industry, and fat defense contracts have paid for everything from R&D that created the Internet, to technology used by Boeing from to build non-military jets. The government is pumping money into the economy by this method - the downside is it is a "trickle down" way of doing it, sort of like the current tax cuts skewed towards the wealthy, thus the idle rich will see a lot more money than workers.
Is there anyone on Slashdot that hangs onto Windows for anything other than games?
May we never see th
The military is not a democracy. It protects a democracy. Imagine if your PHB made all the decisions without input from you. Imagine if your CEO/COO made all of the software purchases in a large company. The people who run and maintain servers in the military, report to people who report to people...who finally decide what software to buy. The overpriced hammer is a result of the managment model required for them to be able to do some of the things they are asked to do.
:-) They have more than any company I have ever seen has in the way of FM's.
Someone made a joke about RTFM. You apparently have never been involved with the military.
This space intentionally left blank.
OMG! LOLOLOOLOLLLOLLOLOL!#!Â!%!Â!"#!#
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
The Army will be rolling out these computers just like N. M. C. I.. The OS of choice will undoubtedly be Windows 2000 SP1 just as it is in N.M.C.I. Also, Office Pro 2000 SR-1a is standard on all machines amongst a host of other apps. Visio is a part of the standard suite of apps. The contract is being fulfilled by EDS. The $950.00 price tag is not across the board. That is just the baseline. Premiums will be paid for faster machines, laptops, and Science & Technology seats.
The transition has been rough so far as users have found that they cannot abandon their legacy seats in every case. Thus, you see a lot of dual-desktop situations. I hope the Army takes into account the lessons learned from the Navy and Marine Corps' efforts.
No text
You fail it. :-P
The scene in South Park the movie where the army general shoots Bill Gates is one step closer to reality.
I'm really impressed. Microsoft must really have it on the ball. An organization known to pay $800 for a hammer chose Microsoft as their software vendor.
"Half a billion here, half a billion there... pretty soon you're talking about real money." [with apologies to the late Senator]
I don't know if you guys know this or not, but most government contracts have a clause that says that they can back out of a deal if a sufficient argument can be made that there is a better deal to be had.
My point... maybe if someone made the argument to the Sec of the Army (actually, probably one of the undersecretarys) that a better computing infrastructure could be built using alternative software (Linux/*BSD/or other) and a 24/7 support team (like in the hundreds of people), they could conceivably kill this deal.
Smoking has been allowed on USN submarines. I'm not sure what the current policy is.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Just watched South Park movie again last night, so this article brings back the memory of the command central where the 3d map of the world goes on the fritz, and BG is called in to answer, and quickly ends up with a bullet in his head.
i feel i need to clear a few things up for those of you who aren't in the resale industry. first off, the article says nothing about them buying the systems from Softmart. second, since this is a 6 year agreement and it says that Softmart get's a commision, this is not a resale it's an Enterprise Agreement. that kind of contract is handled direct only and Microsoft controls the pricing, but in order to make things fair for LARs (large account resellers) the deal has to be sponcered by a LAR. that reseller get's a kickback commision (like 2%), not a sale. in an Enterprise Agreement, they are agreeing to an accross the board standard to your desktops. if that $900 figure is correct then they got a great deal because that will cover the OS, Office, and all the core CALs for 6 years, including automatic upgrade rights for anything new that comes out (which given the upgrade cycle should be about 4 new versions of each). any normal company would have to pay about 5 times more for this. just try and name a company with a large install base that wouldn't jump at 4 OS's, 4 Office's and 4 of each CAL for $900. this news shows us two things in reality. one is that there is a helluva lot of markup in this product. and second is that the miltary made a good move (or MS a bad one) because they would have bought all this anyway, but at a much higher price over time. by the way, an Enterprise Agreement is not an upfront sale but a yearly payment with true-ups.
FateCreatr, Out.
So what if you have to call a tow truck every once in a while..
Speak before you think
Yeah buddy!
i dunno about everyone else, but me, i see this as a golden opportunity to whine about the entire US gov't procurement system. i'm not familiar w/ it (although i'm sure someone here is and has already had his post modded +5 informative) but my understanding is it's painfully bad.
ed
Yeah, only those of us who have jobs and don't live in our parents' basement use Windows.
All I can think while reading this story is, why can't our schools have this kind of buying power? I suppose in a way it's good, because they'd end up buying MS crap. But this seems like some flagrant flaunting of an over-budgeted organization.
You drank my drink, you drunk!
Yep....the great thing about this is that it'll be obslete within a year or two, so the Army will have to up it's budget every year........greed feeds on greed, I guess.
After all, it IS the Army........
Personally I would rather see the money spent on smart bombs that minimalize civilian casualties. While I'm no lover of war, when it's necessary, I personally think killing less innocent people is good.
Um. So we could use them in places like Iraq, to "stop the terrorist threat and prevent Saddam from using his weapons of mass destruction"?
The United States hasn't been in a "necessary" war since World War II. Bombing people in Bosnia or Iraq is hardly "necessary".
May we never see th
I'm a sys admin and I need it for stuff like Terminal Services on the 2k machines I administer. No, I don't have a choice of which OS we use. If it were up to me, we'd be running Debian or OpenBSD.
In the USA, education is a mere 14% of the military budget -- pretty sick, isn't it?
Children are losing out, and with that money Microsoft is growing. Now isn't that disgusting?
first time the US Army actually PAYS for Software.
The irony about the whole piracy bit it is that the US Army is among the biggest pirates out there, and got the worst attitude about it. At least on the enlisted man side. I cannot immagine field grade officers being any diffrent.
Generals on the other hand might get pissy
Yes! Slashdot now has a room on AOL Instant Messenger.
Join chat room "Slashdot" or use this AIM hyperlink: Click Here .
as being down-skilled in regards to intelligence and computer aptitude. But even if it were true, there are still DE/WM combinations, along with various default installs of apps, that make things easy for such a demographic.
Install KDE or GNOME with WindowMaker or Sawfish, and a good file-browser, like Gentoo or GWorkspace, along with some apps like OpenOffice, Phoenix, and that do-it all e-mail prog (forget it's name).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Shit thanks. I'll keep a list for next time.
As god as my witness I will make those jokes seriously uncool.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
From the NSA Homepage(emphasis mine):
NSA has developed and distributed configuration guidance for Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000 in the form of configuration guides. These guides are currently being used throughout the government and by numerous entities as a security baseline for their Windows systems.
To assist our Windows XP user community, NSA has developed security configuration guidance for Windows XP, with the cooperation of other government agencies and industry partners who provided their expertise and extensive technical review. The configuration guide for Microsoft Windows XP is being posted on the NSA web site and is presented in two parts: ".INF" file and the configuration guide.
Is the military a business? IMHO, the DEA is :P
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Its typical of the government to something like this. Our tax dollars at work I guess!
No problem
Anything to help a very good cause
Slashdot, the site where everything's made up and the points don't matter
Go to this page http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/bbaile y/aboutMaina.php
and get the June 10th comic.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I don't buy MS but I'm wondering if they use the same model, in which case the Army using a VAR wouldn't surprise me.
Advice: on VPS providers
Use rdesktop to administer those RDP machines.
The US Army and Microsoft team up. Does this mean when the US Army shoot at allied troops they will be able to blame it on a buggy Microsoft targetting system instead of themselves?
After severeal deals like these every pacifists dream will become true. The US military will have fully disarmed,and while being the most expensive military in the world it will not be able to hurt a fly.
If anyone has followed the most recent military programs, such as the last super-advanced bombers and fighters that have all proven absolutely useless, knows what i am talking about.
Since the military has had many problems with their software when purchased or provided through Microsoft. I wish I was in closer contact to my cousin. He's 3rd string Secret Service for President Bush, and he's a computer nerd as well. He'd probably keep track of things if he was in a position where he could.
I remember when the DoD bought a bunch of G4s back when the commercial from Apple described the machines as "Supercomputers", and the Pentagon had declared them as such, so they couldn't be shipped outside the US for a while. This had all happened because they were running into the BSoD so often on the aircraft carriers and such. (Rumor has it a divide by zero error on NT caused one such craft to shut down completely.)
Well...this has obviously been in the works for a while, because I would hope the Services would have taken a look at the G5 if computer technology had been in their budget. But they don't even ship for 2 months and other things are already settled. Oh well.
I just think it is enormously dumb for the Services to purchase ANYTHING software wise. I think they'd have their enlisted computer nerds shipped off to a base and forced to program a perfectly solid OS for them, as well as accompanying software.
Double oh well.
I got nothin'.
You are trolling. I will call you trollie!
Um, Microsoft paid almost three times the value of this contract in taxes last quarter. Read their income statement.
Easy ....
Stop being a cheap little bitch, and upgrade to something newer than WinME.
Is there anyone on Slashdot that hangs onto Windows for anything other than games?
Work.
http://use.perl.org
Imagine if they'd spent that amount of money on a space shuttle replacement, or a manned^H^H^H^H^H^Hpersonned mission to Mars.
Stick Men
...paying $640 for a toilet seat cover, $435 for a hammer or $7,600 for a coffee maker. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly .asp?ARTICLE_ID=17695
He goes on to explain that the ashtray costs $400 to research and to make; however, whenever you are in a sub, the ashtray won't break into millions of bits during combat action.
Very interesting. How does this relate to Microsoft software? *ducks*
Stick Men
They are site licensing the server products, almost the entire product line. Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc etc etc ad nauseaum.
Indeed, I feel ill. What exactly does all that shit provide that free software does not? Vendor lock-in? Great.
The details aren't being disclosed because MS doesn't want their other customers getting pissed at the ball breaking that the Army gave them
Nuts. I've never heard of a non-clasified public purchase with a NDA. It's my half a billion dollars, I want the details. Only crooks who sell crap have to hide their details. You would think they would be happy to give anyone buying half a million computers a similar deal.
There's no excuse for buing into more Microshit right now. Computer hardware has been more than adequate for general purpose desktop computing for the last six years. If the software those computers came with is no longer up to the task, I suggest looking at alternate software. There are a few other good American companies that could use this kind of shot in the arm but would provide a much better product:
We can be sure that Dell, Gateway, etc would be happy to work with any of the above software firms for this contract.
The fact of the matter is that the US Army took a half a million computer order and got themseves treated like some dinky midsized company with a thousand desktops. Next thing you know, they will be on the three year upgrade cycle. They did it because they were told to do it that way or they were incompetent. Either way, it's un-fucking-forgivable. They have a whole, ummm, Army of technically qualified people!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Like Microsoft has ever been held accountable for any software failure.
Like they admit immediately that they are at fault.
Like it never takes them more than 3 days to publish a patch.
Like they are going to refund the administration for any inconvenience due to their software (the SQLServer vulnerabilities and worms, anyone ?).
Like it wouldn't be better to have a FS/OSS infrastructure, with a handful of FS/OSS programmers with a good grasp of the code to act immediately in case of a major problem.
These knee jerk reactions are oldhat.
Riiiight. How about stupid excuses such as "They have a firm to blame" ? Why not "they have a dead horse to beat" ?
I think it would be a real change in the mentality and efficiency of everyone in his/her job, not only in the army but also in other administrations, if, instead of having a "blame Microsoft" excuse, people only had a "blame yourself" excuse. That would bring a real level of responsibility and commitment to everyone at every stage in the deployment of IT.
"Dedicated to serving them.". MmmmmppffrrtBWA-HA-HA-HA !!!
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
I'd bet that a huge majority of Slashdot readers use Windows as their primary OS. Both at home and work. I've tried a few different Linux distros at home, but keep coming back to Windows because I know how to do things in it and it's just easier. If time wasn't an issue I'd try harder to kick the habit. I do use Mozilla because I'm hooked on tabbed browsing and mouse gestures so give me a little credit.
Is there anyone on Slashdot that hangs onto Windows for anything other than games?
A better question is why do people on Slashdot still hang onto IE? Windows I can understand, because many of us are at work when we are posting, but why IE? I would guess that 95% of the posters on here are using IE, and that doesn't even take into account the lurkers and people who only view the front page.
--Drunk as in Beer
I wonder how many xboxes with Halo are included? ;-)
Out: I am an Army of one.
In: You will be assimilated.
New
Now there's one degree of separation between you and the people we want to kill.
I heard that the Army is changing it ranking system:
Enlisted recruit -> Developer Preview
Private -> 1.0
Corporal -> 1.0 Service Pack 1
Sergeant -> 3.0
Lieutenant -> 2000
Major -> 2003
General -> Longhorn
Commander in Chief -> Nickname: Gates
That's almost 500000 computers all running Windows, folks. With a 20:1 ratio, that's 25000 MCSA jobs. Those certification schools were right! I need to certify today!
In other news...
REDMOND, Wa - Microsoft, now a strategic national security asset, is increasing security around it's Redmond, Washington campus. Now known as "Fort Redmond", a 20 foot wall laced with barbed wire is expected to be built within the year. Local residents are outraged....
We now have new respect for technologies like Windows Terminal Server or GotoMyPC.com combined with Centrino technology. That could be a tank you're logging into.
Overheard during a training exercise:
"Sorry, Sarge, I can't find the orders yet. Its mixed in here somewhere with all of this spam.
Enough already!
How about this one?
You could also use VNC or similar.
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
I'm with you on that one. I've tried many a time to switch to Red Hat as my primary OS except for gaming, and it's hard. As much as I want to get away from M$, XP works really well for the stuff that I do with it (music playback, DVD watching, gameing, browsing).
I could live without a lot of that, but why would I want to?
hehe... I like that comment. Windows is actually a fairly good OS. While everyone complains about it, it does work, most of the time. Too bad "most of the time" isn't good enough for "most people". Then again, if switching OS's on your computer were as easy as switching cell phone providers, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt a very long time ago. :-)
-Joshua
Now, all intellegence organisations round the world will be occupied by spying on the US to find out how this blue screen of death weapon really works.
Preliminary tests in Germany have already indicated that penguins totally resists the effects of this weapon.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
My uncle works at the CIA and according to him the government isnt allowed to use Windows for combat (apparently windows says in documentation you can't use Windows in combat situations). So they use a modified combat-version of unix. What would the army be using 494,000 non-comabt windows computers? ~Spikeman56
the erroneous statement bashing Microsoft is modded up, and the posts correcting it are untouched.
No matter how you look at it, Microsoft just made $460 million profit. That is considering $11 million in paperwork, marketing to the Army, and paying some government officials off; which is an over-estimation in their expenses. Non-the-less, you see how they sit on $40 billion in cash (soon to be ~$40.5 billion).
I would unstall the crap if I were able to. But, then if and when my computer crashed, once it came back online, I wouldn't be able to file a "report" about it with microsoft, cause that thing only works under IE :-( I use Mozilla for everything else, and so far it's the best thing I've used.
-Joshua
Welcome to last year. I thought zealots usually were more up-to-date than this. I don't know of anyone who has seen a BSOD in the last year or so. I've seen as many kernel panics in the last year as Windows crashes and I have both Linux and Windows boxes that run 24/7.
Mod: -1 (Antiquated humor)
Wow. And I thought that flood of money coming in from around the world might seep into the US economy some how.
If they really had all that money comming in, they would not need my tax money would they?
You're going to tell me that Microsoft keeps all its money in Swiss bank accounts now too, and only employees people from China.
They could tell you both of those things. It's not like it's going to their stockholders or employees. M$ is notorious for getting work done with perma-temps and engaging in other tight fisted nonsense. They are also working hard to replace everyone with offshore labor because starvation wages in India are much less than starvation wages in Redmond. That's unforgivable for a company that never paid a dividend till last year. But, you know, a company that screws it's custormers will also screw it's employees and stockholders.
The recently inked deal screws you and me too. Just when I thougt I'd escaped the M$ tax, Uncle Sam gives it back to me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Don't be surprised if this isn't much more than just the operating system, office, and a few other pieces of the Microsoft suite. These kinds of sweet deals happen all the time - it's the government's way of thanking the companies that keep them in power. Maybe I'm reading a little too much into it, but it sounds like a classic case of pork-barreling to me.
One of the reasons a hammer costs $700 (to use a fictional example) is because whoever sells the hammer will be giving some of that $700 to campaign contributions and lobbying and the like.
Yes, Mozilla and Tabbed Browsing kicks butt.
-Joshua
More fool them. They won't be able to read and use the various office and open formats that the rest of the world uses.
...$471,000,000...494,000 Army computers...
A FAQ I found at www.navy.mil says there are 480,000 active-duty soldiers in the U.S. Army.
I know there is a bureaucracy beyond just the soldiers, but one of sufficient size to require more computers than there are solidiers??? Also, this deal appears to be just for the Army--not other DoD agencies that do a lot of stuff for the Army.
From the Yahoo! article: Keith Hodson, a Microsoft spokesman, said the contract could help the Army reduce its costs and "validates the Army's belief in our security model."
This isn't exactly something to validate a citizen's belief in the Army's security model!
Additionally: "We look at the Army deal as incremental evidence that Microsoft continues to outperform as a business and that the longer-term, subscription style business model is indeed gaining significant traction," Di Bona wrote in his report.
As final proof of its global power, Microsoft is now taxing the U.S. Government!
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I think that you're looking in the wrong place if you are seeking material for a study.
But I guess this all goes without saying - you wildly witty dog you.
Also, I know that the [windows] certification is bogus, but are there any C2 or higher certified Linux distributions? C2 or higher is one of those required rubber stamps in the procurement process, and there's no port of Office to Trusted Solaris.
In short, there are a lot of reasons why the government may choose to purchase retail. Besides technical reasons, you can think of this as a Bush administration "Economic Stimulus Package."
-30-
I know this is mod as funny but, this scenario would be highly doubtful as they would most likely have wanted some level of support to go along with the software.
I hear RedHat might have some kind of support or something...
Reading various comments here, I thought Iâ(TM)d stick my nose in. [background â" former USAF Windows programmer]
Wait a minute... they just agreed to purchase half a billion dollars worth of software and you're saying they can't afford to hire people to oversee the customization and support they might need with something like Linux?
Fools
Waste of tax dollars
Use a FOSS solution!
Linux would be way better
Simple corporate welfare
Shame on the military for using Windows in the first place!
BSOD
Crashing missiles
blah de blah de blah
Hereâ(TM)s a shocker. Windows may be more cost effective for a huge organization that already is using Windows. Let me repeat thatâ¦
Windows may be more cost effective.
How so? They already use it. Switching to Linux for the desktop would take several years, and be considerably more than $0.5B. With the possibility of it going very, very wrong. Not all Win -> Linux conversions go smoothly.
Why so long and costly? There are literally thousands of custom apps, large and small, that the Army runs on. Already written and in use. Everything from creating ID cards to allocating training munitions to various units. Currently, they run on Windows. What do you think they use now? Pencil and paper?All of these would have to be rewritten in some way. 2, 3, 5 10 years ago when all this stuff was being written, guess what? A viable Linux solution was but a wet dream. You had but 2 choices, Apple or Windows, for regular desktop deployment.
Now...of course you cannot roll out a whole new desktop environment all across the Army on the same day. There will be considerable overlap. So you also have to ensure interoperability between old and new as you roll out. The Army cannot stop business for the several years while this is going on.
You also have to ensure that all of your current hardware is supported. Are there Linux print drivers for the ID card printers? How about the digital camera for that?
Can we build a Linux solution to interface with the hospital patient records db? Sure...but we already have a Windows solution that works, and works well.
Can Civil Engineering find a Linux CAD solution, equivalent to AutoCAD, to design the plumbing and electrics for a new dormitory? Haven't seen one.
What about Public Affairs and the imaging shop? Are there Linux drivers for the digital Nikons they use? Oh..we have to have those written. But there are already native Win drivers for those...supported from the factory.
Laptops. Will Linux work on all the various laptops (with their custom mouse and video drivers) the Army deploys? Maybe...maybe not. But Windows already does. They might well have to buy a whole fleet of different laptops, if Linux can't be made to run effectively on the ones they have.
Linux may well be more stable, secure, and crash (slightly) less. But this is basically desktop use. So what! This is regular desktop use. It just doesnâ(TM)t matter if it is not the most absolute secure system on the planet. These systems are not facing the outside. And not running life critical apps. They don't steer missiles with Win2K.
Take all that into account (and this is but the merest tip of the iceberg) and staying with Windows might well be cheaper than trying to switch.
Backing up Pocket PC/ActiveSync.
Extras on DVD.
All things work related (SQL Server/VB/Crystal Reports)
Sites that use ActiveScript.
and I have a feeling that Redhat 9 isn't going to like my USB mouse or the USB memory stick reader I might get.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Thanks for the tip! Shweet!
C'mon guys, you know the reason for all this is finding better ways to waste your tax money. *sigh*, Tax dollars going towards Microsoft through a re-seller. Someone over at the army needs to hook these machines up with Lindows or some cheap or possibly free opensource alternative... Aye, but it's all about the money, and the fact that Micro$oft has plenty or pursuading powers...
A common problem is the use of NTLM authentication on work proxies, or the inability to install new software.
There is also the issue of people requiring IE for their intranets, and a lot of people simply cannot be bothered using two browsers at once.
Don't Know about the USB mouse but the memory stick is no problem
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Seriously, did Redhat or any of the other big Linux players bid on this contract (IBM?)?
If not, then shame on them. Maybe they didn't know the deal was going down, but often these RFP's are public information.
That money would have gone a long, long ways towards making Linux the best OS out there. It's almost there now and just about any current distro would work fine, but that money could've been used to quickly fix any minor problems still plaguing Linux (eg. get rid of all text based config tools). As others have mentioned, they could've hired on the best Linux developers available to make everything 100% perfect. I don't think that little extra development would've taken any extra time out of their current schedule and would create jobs for many people along with increasing security, decreasing M$'s monopoly, and bettering open-source as a whole.
As well...
The ratio of people to cake is too big
While on face value, yes, that's true, how will any company ever be able to compete *ever* when huge contracts are only handed out to huge companies? This is classic chicken/egg. I've got a strong gut feeling that if redhat had landed a $490 million dollar six year contract they damn sure would be around in 6 years, and be much stronger for it. That type of taxpayer money going to continually aid a company which has been recently found in violation of federal laws is decidedly poor judgement. Would spending somewhat more on open source packages be a better use of taxpayer money? Yes. Notice I said 'spend more' - Move it to 500 million. Or 600 million. That would be money which would be more easily returned back to the community which would have a more positive knock off effect for a broader segment of society, not just MS shareholders.
creation science book
Hey,
/ 29/eveningn ews/printable325985.shtml
While we're whining about US military propping up M$ with a cool 500 mil, let's not forget the pentagon can't account for 2.3 trillion dollars of taxpayer money!
"Its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends"
They have know idea where it goes (or secretly know but won't disclose!)
Source:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01
The problems with Windows today have more to do with Microsoft's hopelessly corrupt corporate culture than anything to do the OS. Microsoft over the years seems to have completely lost the ability to even think in terms of honest competition and succeeding through excellence -- it has become a kind of mafia.
...
It they: (A) straightened out their security problems, and (B) stopped ruining software by going for the customer 'lock in', it would be a pretty good product. Alas, I expect the second point will never happen
write you representivities at how appalled you are at this. tell them your concerns that at a time of finincial hards ships, they are pay a 1/2 a billion dollars for something that could be done for at least half that.
write your news papers. When the public finds out that the Army is wasting this kind of money when there children are have school days cut, and programs slashed from undernieth them. Write every newspaper you can think of, large and small. Make this an issue.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
or somewhere else if you think that MS doesn't do well in the enterprise environment.
As for scalability and transaction processing, MS Currently hold the record for TPC-C Non-clustered, TPC-H, and TPC-W...
The following folks might be offended that you don't consider them "enterprises", (especially Enterprise Rent-a-car):
1&1 Internet AG
Alta Resources
Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI)
Austrian Ministry of the Interior
Avanade
Bank of New York
Belgian Federal Public Service of Foreign Affairs
CIGNA Corporation
City of Hamburg, Information Technology Office
Clalit Health Services
Cornell Theory Center
Digex
Eka Chemicals
Enterasys Networks
Enterprise Rent-A-Car
GE Medical Systems
GMAC Commercial Mortgage
GoldQuest International Ltd
Honeywell
Infospace, Inc.
Interland
Intrawest
Inventure Solutions Inc.
JetBlue Airways
Johns Hopkins
Kentucky Department of Education
LexisNexis Group
Liberty Medical Supply
LifeCenter Northwest
London Stock Exchange
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
MEI Hotels
Mercator Bank & Insurances Group
Motorola, Inc.
Ocean Spray
PFE International
QUALCOMM
Qwest
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Reuters
Safeway, Inc.
Saks Incorporated
Sandvik
Siemens
SmartPipes, Inc.
Sony Ericsson
Steelpoint Technologies
Tesco.com
The Space Needle Corporation
Timex
U.S. Air Force Standard Systems Group (SSG)
UNX, Inc. (Universal Network Exchange)
WebCentral
WestAmerica Mortgage Company
Link to the Microsoft Marketting Machine where I scammed this list
Dupe posts are
Hotplugging makes USB a snap. On my slackware box anyway, my memory stick shows up as a scsi device. Mount it and away you go ... Even my Logitech USB quickcam pro 3000 was found using the default install kernel. Woot! Linux (and slackware) has come a long way!
Likely scenario:
1. Download foo RPM and install
1a. Wrangle with dependencies for RPM
1b. Finish install
2. Where's the ICON?
Hello?
3. Sit back with an icecoffee and realize this is the tip of the iceberg.
This has more to do with the intelligence of distribution authors than the users.
$700.00 for a hammer.. $250 for the hammer $350 for spare parts and The rest for a Maintentance Contract
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
I fully agree, most of my users have serious problems just operating windows, let alone doing work on it. If you threw Linux at them, they would just stop using the computer and go back to doing everything on paper.
another thing is that while the liscense costs for all the software that they're getting isn't horrible price-gouging, we don't fucking need it.
I'm in an officer school, the only function for having a database is for keeping track of student information. I already have an access database in place with an oracle database slowly replacing it. I don't need or want SQL and NONE of my users need it, either. we don't need to buy a shit load of liscenses at slightly above prices, what we need is to break that chunk of cash up and give it to the units so that their Sysadmins and IMOs can determine what the unit needs.
I'll give you a little story as an example of how trying to add too many pieces to the puzzle WILL fuck up a supply chain:
earlier this year, I needed 14 computers. I sat down and figured out the paperwork bullshit and forms for it (I'm actually Infantry and have zero training for admin stuff). I priced out how much it would cost for what we needed and found several retailers that we could go through. I sent that stuff up to higher and after about 2 months of that paperwork going through commitee and bueracracy, I got 14 computers that were totally different from what I requested, cost more, lacked software liscenses and hardware that my users needed for them to do their jobs.
anyone higher than brigade levels has no fucking clue what a battalion needs, and even then they don't really know.
this whole package for stuff we don't need irritates me.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
Work.
Wife.
that we wanna blow up
Fuck you.
when the controller computer BSOD's
What makes you think the controller would be running Windows?
It will do the same thing open sores software will do when it kernal panics.
Any company with two brain sells buy the msdn subscription with sever aliscense for much less money.
whats the point if making things for lars if you are only going to specify "I want windows"? If they said "I want a OS with a GUI tha can run an office sweet that support open standards" now you have competition for a product, and thau LARS amke sense.
It is a sale in that the Softmart sales people pushed to be the chosen LAR. wether youir sell ing a service or a product, your still selling. which is fine, but a rose by any other name is still a rose.
Te military made a BAD move by getting further locked into a proprietary system when they do not have to be. whether or not is Microsoft is an other issue, I just think it is the resposibility of the government to maintain as much openess as transparency as possible.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Personally, I'd prefer the government not take over private companies. Besides, Corel is Canadian, and I'd imagine the Canadian government might have something to say about that.
Give me a break. Linux is Open Source, anything developed with open source has to stay open source - hence nothing could be classified.
Christ, not everything is a corporate-pandering conspiracy theory.
It's called wireless networking, and Linux is a biotch to set up with my pcmcia network card.
What a waste of money. As a taxpayer who actually ends up footing the bill for this I continue to be outraged that opensource alternatives aren't mandated when possible. The government has a duty to reduce costs whenever possible and this is a perfect example of where they could have done that, yet went with the status quo. Its simply Un-American to waste money like this when there are other options. Not to mention Opensource software has a vastly superior track record when it comes to security, let alone stability.
Sure, use the best tool for the job, but there exists open source alternatives for all the software they are using. The fact that the MS rep had the balls to say this deal "validates the Army's belief in our security model." makes me want to puke. Those billions of dollars lost evey year due to viruses...that is DIRECTLY because of shoddy MS software. When it comes to security, MS is the joke of the industry. Just now are they shipping a server OS that is somewhat secure by default. Of course their client OS is still a hackers delight. When IE and Outlook are involved you simply can't have secure computing. Can't wait till the next version of Klez or whatever hits. Oh and it WILL happen.
Anyway enough rambling. This deal stinks and for all the current governments talk about reducing expenses this is a prime example of how some things never change.
Maybe some people will consider this post a generic response to a situation where OpenSource has lost out to MS in a deal, but I'd say its the businesses and groups whocontinue to blindy by MS software who are the ones that are losing out.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Military Intelligence... yeah!
"In God we trust, all others must bring data" - W. Edwards Deming
Canon Scanner. Those Linux-haters.
Otherwise, I'd kiss this winbloze parition goodbye.
This is very true and I fully agree with you.
-Joshua
Of course the US army will get Microsoft software! It's clear that linux is communism! [quoting Steve Ballmer]
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
They don't need to be a corporation - they can outsource anything, and often do.
Doesn't the truism Wife == Work apply here?
"$950 per computer this clearly involves more than just the OS"
9.5$/cal and if the system accesses 100 other systems on the network there you have your cost.
You also have the option to be a loner. âoeThe army of oneâ could come in really handy.
Could someone please tell me what's so friggin' "hard to use" about a distro like RedHat or Mandrake? Is it *that* hard to click on "have Disk Druid automatically partition for you"? Is it *that* hard to click on "automatically configure monitor"? Is it *that* hard to click on a big G-shaped foot rather than a green button labeled "start"? Honestly the only complaint I've had with the user-obsequious distros is trying to get a software modem to work.
Honestly, I'm getting a little tired of this old saw. Unless you've got some seriously obscure hardware or a seriously obsolete distro, I just don't see what all the "difficulty" is.
All's true that is mistrusted
Guess the name of a software company who will fund King George II'campaign?
I sure hope there was some sort of stipulation as to what versions of Windows they would be getting on these systems. XP is ok for now, but 6 years from now? :(
E.
Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker
For one, read this link on NSAKEY, somebody who actually knows about that which he speaks:
l #N SAKeyinMicrosoftCryptoAPI
http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-9909.htm
Second, why aren't you complaining about Microsoft's competitors donating money to the Democrats to buy an anti-trust trial?
Sure, I hang on to it for the hn210w driver, among other things.
Waste, fraud and abuse. This type of situation is infortunately quite common in DoD, harks back to the $600 hammer. Unfortunatley you're tax dollors which are supposed to be for defense end up going to corporate welfare. DoD has turned into the largest barrel of pork/corporate welfare in the USA. MM
Some friends and I decided that \. more accurately describes the slant, though.
Constitutionally Correct
Is there anyone on Slashdot that hangs onto Windows for anything other than games?
Work.
Wife.
Wireless.
Winmodem.
They buy PCs with the M$ OS installed (Top tier stuff like Dell, compaq, HP, etc.)
*AND*
They have a license agreement with M$ that covers ALL PCs, old and new.
I asked around and I was told it's because they can find (or won't ask for) PCs without an OS. (Laptops especially!)
And you know M$ does not honour the clause in the EULA for returning un-used software and giving your money back!
Maybe our governments have less power than we are lead to believe...
This deal is a lot bigger when you consider all the other armed forces are going to need to be compatible with each other.
The Air Force will be next then the Navy then the Marine Corps will probably use Linux because we kick more ass on 25 Cents and give you a dime back because we care to send the very best.
In Soviet Russia, Windows owns you!! uh, wait a minute...
Amen to that. When I was an Infantry officer I encountered the same thing. I figured, "Hey, in the *real* world of Corporate America, things must be more efficient. After all, since everyone is trying to save or make money, nobody will put up with this sort of wasteful bullshit. There are no Mad Minutes in Corporate America. There's no federal accounting that forces you to spend it or loose it.
Then I started working in Corporate America, and found out that I was dead-wrong. Nobody literally gets on the firing line to blow off ammo before the fiscal year ends, but I've seen so many instances of ass-covering, ego driven "strategies" and just complete incompetence out here in the private sector. In fact, I've come to realize that while the Army's procurement system does suck ass through a straw, in many ways the overall efficiency of the Army (at least at the unit level) is far greater than that of most corporations.
The military periodically gets nailed for million-dollar hammer episodes and the like, but believe me, staggering incompetence is not the exclusive domain of Uncle Sam.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
RedHat 9 works just fine with the USB mice I've used with it, the wheel even works all teh time (which is more than I can say for Logitech's Win2k drivers, grumblemutter.)
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!
Do you understand how nice and customized a system the government could have if they put $471 million into personalizing their linux desktop ?
To give you an idea, Redhat, the leading linux distribution, as a company puts about $10 million into R&D each year.
Especially in light of the fact that *BSD is DYING.
Yep, the Army is a business, but I bet Dell would classify it as "Government" just like they do the local universities, and give them that package (which also includes the option to ship without an OS, if I'm not mistaken). Still, the Army is a business. We're constantly reminded that we have to make our customers happy (and in my particular branch of things, the customers are the people who would die if the dam broke ;)).
So instead of creating jobs in research and development we are giving loads of money to a known abusive monopoly holder who will most likely use it to put good people out of work.
Isn't this what the US Army is anyway? They're just supporting a reflection of themselves.
I write sig's like I know what I'm talking about.
Dell is perfectly happy to ship a business OS-less PC's if the business tells them they have a volume license deal with Microsoft. Just because the website makes you buy OS/Software for one PC doesn't mean a volume order for 1000's of PCs would work the same.
Give it a rest. IE is the best software that has come out of Microsoft. I know that's not saying much, but give IE some credit...
[Seoul] After the successful air drop campaign used over Iraq, the US Army is at it again. This time, North Korea.
"Out Windows 2K drop last year was very effective in desimating the enemy's computer usage.", a senior officer was overheard saying. "Now, armed with the extra potent power of WinXP, N. Korea should fall in half of the time."
Microsoft also supports the idea. "WinXP is simply more robust than Windows 2000. It's a perfect deployment."
The results of the air drop will take time admittedly, "but we can wait for the shock and awe of WinXP... they won't know what hit em." When asked why they didn't go with the even heavier Windows 2003 Server, he replied, "It just wasn't ready yet. Once we've seen it in action and can be assured of its potential for devestation, it will certainly be added to our arsenal."
Initial figures for the arial bombardment are expect to be around $471 million.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Our government just keeps SPENDING and SPENDING and SPENDING. You'd think that with ALL the fricking PC's they purchase, The Borg would give a significant discount for bulk licenses. Well, it looks like we're back to the REPUBLICAN days of buying $400 hammers and toilet seats. I'd like to know where the money is REALLY going.
IIRC, the NSA or CIA or someone developed a really secure version of Linux somewhere. Oh, wait, slap me in the head, it doesn't run OFFICE (BACK ORIFICE, remember that?). It's NOT COMPATIBLE. The only thing most military personnel need from OFFICE is a word processor and spreadsheet, two items that are FREELY available in OpenOffice.
I can see this happening in the future:
Congressional hearing: George dubya, did you participate in illegal money transfers?
George dubya: I don't understand the question.
Congressional hearing: George dubya, since the Coalition Forces didn't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, did you pay the Saddam Hussein loyalists money using extra money set aside from an inflated Microsoft software purchase (a bribe) to hand over the nuclear weapons program the Iraqi scientists were working on?
George dubya: I don't remember.
George dubya later FAKES a diagnosis of alzheimer's disease are retires on a private ranch in Tixis (Hillbilly phonetics) and slips away from public scutiny and prosecution.
Yup, uhuh, this is how it will happen. And I'm sure George dubya will get his little kick back too from the Borg leader.
Your problem is that you're using a scene from a television show as a way to justify military overspending. Here's something to think about once you pull yourself away from the tube: ashtrays on subs? You're kidding, right? RIGHT?
Well done indeed.
First of all, switching cell phone providers is pretty hard in the US, because it means you end up with ANOTHER phone every time you switch (unless you're lucky...)
As for Windows being a good OS, that was true, until 2000, when ME came out. 2000 was the last good version. AFAIR, the FBI actually issued security warnings against XP.
BTW, this is posted with Opera on 2000. I know 2000 is a good OS.
But remember, we're talking about the U.S. military here. These are the same folks that'll cheerfully pay $400 for a hammer and $600 for a toilet seat.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Socialism != Communism.
Most Socialists (like myself) are not Marxist Communists. Marx felt a central controlled body should direct the means of production to satisfy all needs equally.
Social Democracts or Socalists believe that you should control the economy (or at least greatly (through many influences) stear-it) like any other item in your community; via Democracy. Using the Economy to make MORE people have BETTER lives is the goal of all Government, all Societies, all Communities. And, Socialism is a better method to assure the greatest benefit to the greatest numbers -- bottom line is that it is a more succesfull system. Look to Canada, Look to Western Eurpoe -- higher standard of living than the USA. And, when hubris and greed finally collapses in on the US rigged 'market economy' (how you like that %1 interest rate and MASSIVE debt?) you'll discover that the Russian Fascists only lost the cold war by collapsing FIRST -- the same is going to happen to the USA in the short to medium term... deflation, devaluation of the dollar, unmanagable debt, bankrupcy?
How many do you think know about this ?
Yeah, the slashdot crowd.
Yeah, the guys who read yahoo news and landed on this news snippet by chance.
The "rest of America" = NO CLUE.
What do you think will happen next ? MS will use this info bigtime. Within a week, you'll see huge ads on WSJ, NYT & every other print outlet, and every channel starting with MSNBC, CNN, FOX etc, telling the "rest of America" that the US Army endorses MS software. Immediately, retail customers will get on board. MSFT will zoom into stratosphere. When it can't go any further, institutions & mutual funds will dump MSFT, and the retail guys will get screwed as usual.
I say, use this info. Go out NOW, sell your house and put every nickel into MSFT. Make huge profits, & then invest that into RHAT. Win-win situation.
We have an agreement with MS that gives us unlimited OS and Office upgrades among other things. But it's a yearly contract, and the "other things" seem to change every year. If the military did lock in 6 years of free upgrades on a reasonably extensive suite of software, this may not be a bad deal.
I do wish they'd gone open source though. They certainly have the leverage to tell their vendors that they'll only accept docs and software that conform to open standards.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Yes, this is a bargain for DOD and M$! All of the MS OS/Office items will include maintenance for 6 years @ $900. A centralized distribution will make things easier for everyone involved. Also, this will enable other DOD components to purchase using the same method.
Windows XP Pro - $270.99
Office XP Pro - $449.98
Loading the OS and Office will net you $720.97 for the initial purchase. The remaining balance will provide you with $179.03 to buy upgrades for the next 6 years. Add to this the savings for such a group purchase (i.e. no duplicate purchases, budget planning at lower levels to upgrade software, etc.). Of course, the $700 story and ANY complaint about the government is an easier sell - save the wolf cries for meaningful change.
Finally, the idea that the Army or any other agency simply buys normal consumer systems and duplicates the purchase is not true. Most agencies will buy models that do not include the OS or Windows due to the agreements like this one. Why do you think vendors have separate lines for government, business, and home users?
This is Great News! US army will be rebooting the computers instead of killing!
God bless America
War just got uglier, no thanks to the Luna interface.
First, as many other people have pointed out, these machines aren't being used in "life or death" situations, they're for normal desktop stuff. Did it ever occur to any of you that perhaps Windows does indeed provide a better desktop experience than your average Linux distro? Heresy, I know. Nothing could possibly be better than Linux. And BTW, for those of you repeating those tired "BSOD" jokes: have you used a version of Windows past 98 or what? Win2K and XP are pretty damn stable. A BSOD on either of them is about as likely as a kernel panic in Linux. Get over it, it's time to retire those BSOD jokes.
Second, unless any of you have any real experience with the costs associated with outfitting an entity as large as the US Army with computers, I don't think you're qualified to make assumptions about how Linux "obviously" would've saved 50-90% of the cost. There's a saying in business that when you have people bidding on a contract you throw away the top N% (because they're ripping you off) and the bottom N% (lowballers -- they're obviously underestimating the cost of the job and are under-experienced) and pick among the people in the middle. Hmm, where do you think someone like Redhat would show up relative to other bidders? Furthermore, what makes you think that the Army didn't rule out Redhat (or whatever other "Linux support" company) primarily because they have shown NO history of being able to handle customers with needs as large as the Army? When was Redhat's last $470 million contract, hmm? Don't assume that they'd be up to the job of support just because MS can do it and anything MS can do Linux can do better.
I mean really guys, come on. Don't let your seething hatred of MS blind you to realities of the situation. Maybe, just maybe, with all things considered MS was the better choice.
Switching providers isn't hard at all.. It just costs money, but I wouldn't call it hard to call up a company and say 'activate this phone' and give them all your info. :D
In any case, that wasn't the intent of my post. I was saying that you could go buy the phone, call up and have it activated. And for the most part you would know how to use the phone. If you switch OS's you have to basically learn a whole new language.
-Joshua
Unless you're speaking as an individual who is privy to the terms of the contract, stop jumping to conclusions. In all likeliness, the contract includes Windows, Office and support, at the very least. Never mind the fact that several of the Microsoft server applications require per-seat licenses, in addition to server licenses -- the Army could be factoring those into the purchases as well.
At some point, you have to make the decision to stop pinching pennies and pay more for corporate-level services and applications. Yes, I'm sure the Army overspends aplenty, but I'm sure the service and support they get is pretty good, too.
http://pulz.no/files/fun_pics/guidance_software.jp g
:)
This scares me, it really does
Yeah but the funny thing is, their tax bills are going to be lower so no one cares.
So who's really the victim here? Social programs that rely on state grant money and donations which in turn comes from government grants to states. These grants are GREATLY reduced, causing most states to be in a fiscal crisis right now. Hence, programs like drug treatment centers, domestic violence shelters, homeless shelters, free medical clinics....those are all doing one of two things: Closing down or laying off staff. Both result in hurting the american public.
For instance, here in Colorado, the three biggest special education centers in Denver are closing their doors. The children they were treating now have to go to public schools, which do not have enough regular teachers right now, let alone special ed teachers. This is going to disrupt the education process of even more kids...the public schools are not prepared to handle this. The result? Even more frustrated teachers leaving to get different, better paying jobs, and kids that will care even less about actually learning anything.
A significant number of homeless shelters here also had to close. I'm not talking about crazy-talking-to-himself-bum homeless shelters, I'm talking about the place where families and single moms can go for a few months if they lose their house or job, somewhere they can get back on their feet. Now these people are going to literally be on the street, doing god-knows-what to get by. Wonder why crime rates are up?
Note to Republicans: Trickle-down economics does NOT work! You got your fucking tax cuts, so where's the money now? In a nice safe stock portfolio, because you're too fucking scared to give any to non-profits or invest in a new business.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Its true that the average GI can get things done quicker with an M$ OS, but that is on his home PC. While at work though, its about following a SOP (Standard Operating Proceedure) which renders this whole issue MUTE. All you military folk out there should speak up on this. I see so much crap about the fears of having a GI running a computer through a bash prompt... DUH, wake up, do you actually think that Uncle Sam would train everyone on the finer details of *nix? DUH!!! Its about a front-end app that the GI will be working with which means moving a mouse around, plugging in data, just like you would with an app like Excel, or even a Web browser. ITS NOT ABOUT THE OS, its about training.
Cut 80% of exitsting AmeriCorps after having promised a 50% increase, then spend as much as possible on computers for the army.
"Make sure they all get 17 inch flat screens too!"
-George W. Bush
Budget my ass...
So I won't have to pay M$ or Bu$h.
Joe
Have Linux installed at your place in Amsterdam, for cheap
I mean really guys, come on, don't let your reality check blind you to opinions. MS was the better choice, I would have to concur here, but that doesn't mean you will persuade any linux blood to feel any different about this deal. They've the right to strive for spreading the linux gospel as much as anybody has the right to preach about practicality. If we always choose to side with practicality, we'll never get any diversity.
Otherwise, you have given up hope on anything non-MS. How will proponents of an alternate, opposing viewpoint ever be heard?
As for your experience with windows, I'd have to say that you haven't had enough experience. Not to mention no understanding about the underlying principles that are relevant here. Regardless of the applied use of these desktops, call me an alarmist, but I would want it far more secure than anything I've seen on windows. Want to talk about history and track record? Stop being selective about it. Let's look at the history and track record of ALL the attributes of windows, not just customer handling.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
They can continue running Windows on the NN% of machines running custom windows applications that are not handled by Wine. Doesn't mean they have to pay $950 for PCs that only need a web browser, e-mail, and a basic word processor.
Why not just give the money to soldiers (or whatever endusers) who can figure out how to use Linux? From what I understand, military pay sucks big time compared to our risk-free desk jobs. I am sure they'll buy a book and spend a couple of weekends learning for ~1K bonus.
When I was doing IT in the Army Reserve all the computers in the division were Dell desktops/laptops running Win98/2K and Office 97/2K.
God help me, I even had to teach classes in MS Office. I feel so dirty...
I wouldn't say I'm a bad gambler but the last time I went to Vegas I even lost a buck on the soda machine.
If you had to pay to speak in english would you continue speaking in it or would you change to another language like spanish, russian or chinese which would be 100% to speak in?
I don't know a single word in those lanugages but I would be willing to learn if it was free.
But Microsoft is throwing in a free toliet seat with each computer, which will save the Army about $600.00 per computer and toilet.
I have a xp machine beside me right now that crashes just sitting there. Don't even give me any crap about incompatible software or drivers it is bone stock and just crashes once a week.
Now let me really hit you with a clue stick, when was the last time you read a MS EULA. Microsoft is not responsible for anything that happens with your system and or software, READ IT!
Got Code?
Because at many companies, installing software not approved by company policy is an offence over which that you can get terminated. Even if you are a guru at fixing computers, big companies often outsource their IT so even if you crack the case that's a breach of contract. If the IT people are called to fix a misbehaving machnie and they find other software on it, you will get in big trouble from your manager.
Furthermore, unless you work in IT, your account probably does not have permission to install new software. You've gotta cater to the lowest common denominator - many well meaning users will wreck their machines and get it infested with bonzi buddy if you give them half a chance.
I find rdesktop better then vnc..
= 150
Theres also grdesktop http://freshmeat.net/projects/grdesktop/?topic_id
Its a nice GTK 2 frontend for rdesktop.
When's the last time a customer paying half-a-trillion dollars was contracted with a consumer-level EULA?
First rule of goverment spending:
Why buy one if you can have two for twice the price?
Creepy, rich and bald guy in Contact
So the corporate whores are in bed with the federal government. What else is new? I bet the most republicrats would give tax dollars to the fortune 50 if they could get away with it. The US military's primary purpose (other than terrorizing the world) is to get cash and technology to Big business.
..blue screen death. :|
Side comment: the poster writes, "At roughly $950 per computer this clearly involves more than just the OS."
Not necessarily. These are the same people who in the past have paid thousands of dollars for hand tools and coffee makers.
I use WineX for my windows games.
Look at the story
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
The great things about this deal: the Army is going through a reseller, when clearly they have the purchasing power to buy direct; and most of the computers they purchase are normal consumer machines which will be purchased with Windows and Office already installed, so the Army will be paying twice for each machine
If my government were spending double the amount of money it needed on defense, I wouldn't be calling it "Great", Id be pissed off.
they just need the software, did an evaluation, and concluded that to switch over to OSS at this juncture would cost them way more than $471 million thanks to all of the training necessary combined with the very high cost of trying to migrate hundreds of thousands of existing systems and data to a completely different standard.
The DoD and other government entities learned many years ago that they were paying top dollar for hammers and IT work like suckers, and they instituted a lot of very stringent policies that directly address that problem. When they do any kind of major purchase like this you can be sure they have studied it extensively, and sent out RFPs (Request For Proposals) to several competing bidders, fairly evaluated all of the proposals, and selected the winner. $471 million contracts do not get handed out on a handshake anymore because too many people got their ass handed to them in the 80s, and the government took steps to rectify the situation.
Nowadays when bidding on government proposals, you typically have to bid at much lower service rates than you would to a private company, because the proposals are very competitive, and the goverment doesn't want to look like suckers.
This is the new way for the government to divert/filter money to the super secret organizations and black governments.
Seriously though, before it was hammers and toitlet seats.
Accounting
The navy has an "all MS policy" with exceptions for "legacy" systems. Doubtless the knowledgible folks are #defining world+dog as "legacy"
Everytime there's a backdoor or exploit, people always use it to kill my team.
And if there's lag, OH boy.
Since it is obvious MS still can't protect its software.
Linux can be tedious to set up but I'm so sick and tired of hearing, "But Windows is so much easier. Bash is too hard. Config files are too hard." My mom uses Linux, you know why? Because I set her computer up. It boots into a GUI and a nice clean windowed environment with graphical icons to let her get into all the programs she needs. Is Mozilla Firebird more complex in Linux than in Windows? Is it more complex than IE? My dad still uses Windows because unlike my mom who finally decided to stop being a luddite my dad's been using one for years and has apps he's used to. Still, that's all he knows. When he needs a new email account set up, the background changed or whatever, who does he call? Me. Whether it's a check box or a config file he's gonna call me. My point? Either you're the type that can tweak a computer in which case it doesn't matter if it's a config file or something in a preferences menu because you're trained enough to figure it out or you're the type that's gonna call a tech. I'm sitting here using Xfce4 right now and I almost never touch the shell for standard, day to day operations. I do for certain file management tasks, network troubleshooting and compiling but is the average yutz gonna do that? No. Ultimately we're talking about an organization who has no problem spending MY money on a $400 toilet seat, so why should they even worry about evaluating an alternative? I can see using Windows because they're used to it. That makes sense. But I'm so sick and tired of hearing crap like, "These guys don't give a shit about learning the wonders of the bash shell." There is NO NEED TO EVER SEE A CLI IN LINUX! The Windows GUI isn't any "easier." Clicking an icon and running a program is pretty much the same in both arenas.
What a way to apply the world of the *nix to the real world :-) good job there.
Depends how much they charged for it. If it was reasonable, I would continue with English, only because everyone knows it and uses it and I wouldn't have to put out the extra time to learn the new language. If there were classes to learn those other languages, and those classes were completely free, then sure, i'd learn them and probably convert sooner or later. But because there are going to be those who continue to use the "pay as you go" language, you're still going to have use it (and pay for it) just cause those few are stubborn and don't want to switch.
-Joshua
"I hacked the pentagon" won't be such a big thing to brag about anymore.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
It's a real pity they couldn't donate a million to open office, and a million to the core linux team, and they could pocketed the rest.
why don't use aluminium or wood for ash tray in submarine? instead of spending on research on making less breakable glass.
It remind me of story how the researcher try to make pen that can be used underwater and also at out of space without grafiti, just use pencil instead..
What will happen when the computers blue screen????? END OF THE WORLD!!
I can see your point here. By the time you've educated a grunt enough to be really proficient at using *nix, then he probably also has become intelligent enough to not want to just instinctively kill people anymore either. This would be a huge problem for the Army.
:-)
Come to think of it, after fighting Windows all day long, I sometimes feel the urge to become violent too.... So by making our soldiers use Windows, will actually be a good, motivational thing for them
Aren't OSs used by the Army required to be certified for security, and WinXP and 2000 are not certified for the governmental use? So they install Win98 or '95? With Win98 having 65536+ bugs?
peace
There's a huge, complex and invisible layer of personal connections and influence for this kind of contracts.
Especially if everyone else on the planet would use it. :-)
Need I tell you why? Surely can't be *that* naiive.
Client Access License
So does this mean even more US soldiers will die 'coz of friendly fire?
Here's the secret to immortality:
I'm certain this order spreads payments over the life of the contract and allows the buyer to bail if certain performance requirements aren't met. The buyer has a huge incentive to keep this customer happy, no matter what the EULA says. For software deals that I've seen crossing the 10M mark, the contract is important, but the vendor will do nearly anything to keep the client, no matter what the contract says.
As a former GRUNT (infantry soldier for those with the higher education), I understand the requirement for a graphic interface. After all, to the infantry, Caveman UGG is the perfect rolemodel. I have been from the warehouseing supply, to the trenches, and if I didn't understand it- it got "dropped" (read I drove a truck over it or landed a chopper on it) until I got something I understood and liked! For a final thought in the cold dark confines of a fighting position it's hard to type on frozen fingers let alone remember commands with bullets fling at you. (think I'm wrong and you can volenter to be down range in the hole I'm shooting at to see if you can hack the lights off to save yourself - bet I run out of ammo before you get the lights off.
It seems to me the Army, or perhaps the Defense Department for all armed services, should consider getting the business of having a department for computer systems development. Given an avg annual salary of 75k/yr, 471M is 6,280 man years of engineering development paid for. Given that this 471M is for 6 years, that's still more than 1,000 man years of work per year for the same price. With that much divided to developers, qa, and project mgt, the army could use OSS as the base for customized applications that would truely do exactly what they want, and do it well. Perhaps they could even use the NSA BSD/Linux that is security enhanced for this kind of thing. Not only that, after 6 years they'd own the whole thing and not have to renew any licenses and do this whole thing again. I'm sure with that kind of resource, they could come up with a very easy to use system, and not have to stress about which exact computers are licensed or not, since they would own the entire system and could write their own version/update/access control into it.
If this was performed/controlled by a shared Defense Dept group, the amount of common codebase and reuse would quickly make further developments even easier to integrate with the others. Since all the armed forces would be using a similar codebase and general systems, it might even make it way easier for each of the distinct divisions of the armed forces to synchronize systems with each other as well. Field techs could be trained on the system, providing most of their own field support.
My friend did some contract work for the Army a few months back. They needed a pair of IBM RS/6000 P-series 660s, fully loaded, attached to a pair of FastT700 fibrechannel arrays. Close to $1M worth of hardware, by my rough estimates, having purchased similar hardware in the past.
A friend, eh?
Well I *am* a government network manager who recently acquired a fully-loaded RS6000/p660 with only a single large fiberchannel storage array, and run 350 users on it, including Lotus Domino and several large Oracle databases and apps. This machine only cost my organization $165K. Methinks your cost estimates are waaaaay off base, about as trustworthy as your purported information source. Govt IT folks aren't as stupid as you might think. We're generally quite shrewd about our purchasing habits, and buy the right sized equipment to do the job for more years of useful service life out of it than your typical private enterprise does.
Posting to Slashdot as A/C, natch... yer tax dollars at work, hah! I figure that since according to your cost figures, I must have saved the taxpayers over 300K, so a few minutes surfing at work is justified, eh?
Oh so I'm not the only that has the wheel just stop working for no aparent reason..
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
What's amazing is that not only does Microsoft continue to do business with Softmart, but the federal government is willing to reward this behavior. Weirder still, Softmart was actually tied to Microsoft further: they were one of the half-dozen companies to which Microsoft farmed out the telephone support for Windows 95 upon its release, according to this guy's homepage and this other guy's resume.
2 points to the first person that can tie Softmart to the Bush administration!
-Waldo Jaquith
One-tenth of that $471,000,000 would be easily enough to pay people to bring OpenOffice or KOffice well past the quality level of MS Office in a short amount of time.
Think about it! One-tenth of that amount would mean 471 Open Source programmers paid $100,000 for a year.
And yet all those tax dollars are instead being funneled into the Microsoft "Black Hole of Software License Fees" where they will never be seen again and where they will certainly not benefit the public interest. And that's just one-tenth of the contract! What about all that other money?! They could spend another four-tenths on XFree86, KDE, various security-related projects, etc. and STILL have half the contract amount left over to migrate existing army-specific software to Qt or other superior cross-platform toolkit able run native on both the new platform and any old Windoze machines that haven't been converted yet.
I propose that we need a large non-profit Open Source consulting firm that specializes in large corporate and government contracts such as these. (Non-profit in the sense of the programmers are the only ones being paid.)
This might be true in other government departments, but year after year Congress gives the Pentagon more money than they ask for.
If the Army is to depend on Windows then we are screwed.
The enemy will virus and hack the Army like there is no tomorrow. Not to mention BSODs from hell.
They'll spend more time rebooting than working.
Who's the real enemy?
On one end you have the gov't trying to go after Microsoft for anti-trust and other shit and on the other end you have them paying $960 per machine for shit you could by in the store for about $400..... Who hear really believes that the gov't reallywanted to do anything to microsoft. I believe it was all bullshit propaganda brought on by a ruthless monopolistic corporation that we know as the Government. Fuck the government...when have they done anything for us besides bleed us dry. We work and they get to spend our money on crap like microsoft instead of thins we need. FUCK THE GOVERNMENT..FUCKING COCKSUCKING SCANDELOUS FAGGOTS. it should be the Boston Tea Party all over again.
Work.
Nope.
If at work they told me I must use MS-Windows, I'd quit. Done it before. The good news of being an IT professional is that you still can avoid MS products completely.
So you've found yourself trying to hack into a computer (controlling the power grid presumably?) while under fire in order to turn the lights off so you won't be seen by someone who is already shooting at you? I find this unlikely. If true, I'm wondering why a grenade thrown at a transformer (or even the guy shooting at you), or a bullet at the light bulb (or even the guy shooting at you), would not have been more expeditious?
Six years locked into M$ nonsense, that purchase price is the least of the worries. Patches, daily reboots, systems that don't know the difference between root and private Gomer, Gator, Gomer's privatly installed games, spyware, scumware and outright banditware known as Microsoft. Microsoft shills themselves estimates keeping one of their, "older" computers costs 10,000/year in support. Yet here it is, the biggest single source I've ever heard of. Even Lockheed Martin has to bid for it's work. Shesh, did the RFQ state, "M$ only"?
I really feel for everyone who has to use and maintain this crap. Good luck.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Most of the organisations pay twice for Windows. I know most corporations, schools and colleges buy new machines from dell that already have Windows on them and Dell already charged them for Windows. They then go onto install their customized version of Windows for which they paid the bulk user license fee and if you use one serial for all those machines u get sued even though you've paid your dues to M$.
True enough, and I can't argue that. My 95% guess was probably wrong. But even then, for those given a choice, why IE? Where I work we have a choice, yet I still see IE heavilly used. I think some of the people have given the alternatives a try, and like them. Yet a lot stick with IE. One guy who is a developer, I walk by his office occasionally and I always see him in IE with popups all over the screen. If you're going to use IE, at least get a popup blocker and save yourself some effort.
--Drunk as in Beer
There are certain rules some government agencies must follow, they cannot always grab the best deal. Schools for one must have a contract bid list. They will give discounts on some software and jack the price up for others.
$490 Million may seem like a lot of money but to DoD its not that much....
$490 Million, gets maybe 2-3 Stealth Bombers or 15-20 Apache Helos... and of course this contract is stretched over a long time period, so do the math....
One Tomahawk missile costs 1 Million dollars. How many of them have we shot at worthless targets over the past year???
Good luck keeping all that crap running. If you are using as much free software as you say you are, you know how much easier it is to maintain. Patches, rebuilds, stuff that just never works, ugh, what a pain. Someone needs to write a millspec for software, so you will be forced to buy better quality. This single source contract handed down by the big dogs as a one size fits all "solution" is a really bad sign of things to come. It reeks of disrespect and micromanagement. You have been handed your tools for the next six years, best for the job or not. Good luck. I get ill just thinking what you are going to get to deal with.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not so. I was surprised when I mirrored an slashdotted site. I set my
apache to full logging and waited. After 1500 hits, I found that 68%
where on Linux alone (Phoenix, Konqueror, Galeon, and standard moz.)
FWIW, it was sunday and the story was on the "developers" section, so:
1) This "work" excuse might actually have a merrit. 2) A developer's
story might attract an slightly more sophisticated slashdoter than one
who reads (say) games section or your usual YRO arm-chair activists.
P.S. There were no other Unices, just Linux, and if you count OS X
about 20 or so hits.
Did the computers initally come with Windows XP Home (which is usually what consumer machines come with) or XP Pro? How about office?
Not to gainsay the fact that this expenditure is grossly high, I could see the army having to buy Pro after the initial machine+OS, and possible a better office.
Defense if Federal budget $
Education is primarily State budget $ (we don't have federalized education).
I know in my town, we spend approx. $10k/student.
Lets go with a smaller figure...$5k per student.
Lets underestimate and go with 20,000,000 school age students.
Do the math and show me how we spend less.
C'mon, this is governed by a body who is known for having spent $50k for toilet seats. You figure it out.
This sig no verb.
Microsoft Works
Military Intelligence
You guys have to remember that there is a HUGE digital divide out there and getting soldiers with out much education comfortable with computers tends to be quicker and easier with Windows.
Therefore you want to simplify the training by standardizing on a system which not only holds the record for security vulnerabilities, but whose source has been delivered to the electronic warfare departments of most of our potential enemies but NOT to our own academic-community security specialists?
What do you do the next time there's a conflict and some new crop of blended-threat self-propagating worms (locusts?) suddenly takes out the US Army's entire office infrastructure?
==============
While you're at it, why are you advocating depending on the NON-standardized training the recruits got as civilians rather than teaching them "The Army Way"? (But if you MUST, why not use a Windows-like interface and workalike basic apps, ala Lindows or KDE + OpenOffice, for the basic stuff? They have to learn the army-specific apps anyhow. Meanwhile there's a good chance the next crop of high-school students will be learning on open source platforms rather than Windows, due to developments already discussed on Slashdot.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Rich
The REAL reason I still use IE, for most browsing is because in Nutscrape or Mozilla, when you click on the URL in the address bar, you have to click twice; you have to click once to move the cursor there, then you have to click drag to hilite the portion you want to type over; while in IE, you just have to click-drag.
Bugs the unholy shit out of me. I still use Mozilla for things like web mail, my "daily repeat surfing", but if I suspect I'm going to get off the beaten path, I feel compelled to use IE, even though I KNOW it's wide open to a gazillion exploits because I can't update past the Win2kSP2 level because of the totalitarian Licensing practices of Microsoft instituted at SP3.
Phew.
FREENET=FREESPEECH
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
I know everyone hates MS, and I'm not too fond if the company either, but look at it this way. some of that $471M is going to make its way to MS employees. Those employees have more money, and they will spend more money, and the money gets spread around.
However, one could have a long and heated Economic debate about this, since throwing money at the problem doesn't always fix things.
Did the government bother to dictate that Microsoft use open file formats before dumping so much money on them?
Windows boxes require constant care and feeding, fixpacks, IE patches and the like. This is due to the origins of DOS as a standalone system. This is why so many organizations have full time help desks that are simply swamped. Now compare that with running apps from the server. Certainly you have this capability with Windows, i.e. using Citrix, however with Unix/Linux, this is how it was designed to work from the ground up (for example, X-windows was specifically designed to run over a network connection, this is why you can actually have decent performance over a modem).
For very specific systems such as point-of-sales (think HomeDepot, or your basic chain department store, etc), etc, you will definitely find they run Unix or even on a mainframe, as it's vastly easier to administer.
Therefore, if it were my money (and in a way it is), and I had very specific applications that are required, I would go with Linux. But usually in huge deals like this, there is much unseen bargaining going on that we are not privy to.
Because until you use the alternatives, you don't realise how bad IE truly is. Of course if you don't know how much better the alternatives are, it's too much effort to go download and install another program.
I usually hook people by demonstrating it as a 'by-the-way' sort of item when I have to show something that requires a web browser anyway. I open a link in another tab with a mouse gesture or something like that and they're enthralled. Once I have their attention, THEN I mention popup blocking and all that goodness. Once they're into it, they're raving about the browser's speed and the ability to block images from certain sites.
The key is to not make the purpose of their watching your computer to see Mozilla - their eyes will glaze over if you tell them that you're showing them an amazing new prgoram. Let them realise for themselves the benefits and they'll be jumping up and down wanting to get it!
With recent increases in military spending, I'm not surprised they are feeling so cocky as to worry about going through a reseller to get Microsoft products.
I guess they feel they have all the money in the world (and probably do).
Cygwin
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, and AFAIR, the FBI issued security warnings against Linux and FreeBSD. Do you have anything to back up that rather litigious statement?
what are they doing smoking in a sub
This bit was related to me through a friend who had a relative who was in a sub during WWII.
"When they were submerged he used to keep two cigarettes lit at two different locations, and he liked it because they wouldn't burn very fast and he could just keep them lit by taking a drag at one location or the other. If they went totally out, then there was trouble."
Either this guy was the captain or a high ranking officer, because I don't imagine that they allowed everybody to do that.
The point being, is that the guy enjoyed smoking in a low-oxygen environment because he didn't have to smoke the whole thing within a given time frame like you usually do.
I don't know if this story is true or not. Part of me doesn't want to know. Not to knock the guys in subs now; but men were men back then. There was no A/C on those boats. Real men don't need A/C. Real men don't need oxygen. I mean... the myth of Jebediah Springfield has value too.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
(troll)
Then again, the FBI is issuing warnings about approaching guys having sex with goats.
(/troll)
The great things about this deal: the Army is going through a reseller, when clearly they have the purchasing power to buy direct; and most of the computers they purchase are normal consumer machines which will be purchased with Windows and Office already installed, so the Army will be paying twice for each machine.
You assume that the PC's purchased will come with Windows and Office already installed. This isn't always the case. The company I work for has a huge deal with Microsoft. We buy large quantities of PC's from Dell. We take our software and configure one box and then we use that box to make an image and image the rest of them. I know of many companies that do this with large installations. It doesn't mean we're buying the software twice (once with the PC and once in our volume license).
'Same speed C but faster'
Come on Kif! Let's show these freaks what a bloated, runaway military budget can really do!
Give me liberty or give me kill -s 9
If you are 2000 feet under water, you hear the sounds of torpedos coming at you and you can count off the seconds until you get killed because the torpedo is faster than you are, smoking seems entirely reasonable.
This is my sig.
You've got to be kidding me! Using IE for pr0n is shooting yourself in the foot!
Mozilla has popup blocking, tabbed browsing, and most important of all: mouse gesture controls. That's right, you can do everything one-handed
I guess I'll start learning Arabic now.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
*pshaw*
The Pentagon has misplaced a trillion dollars before, so if you feel that they're mistakenly spending half a billion dollars on something worthless, don't worry about it.
[o]_O
Is it still a req for C2-compliance that the system in question can't be attached to a network? ;-)
Meanwhile I'll watch the day draw nearer where the german military finally switches to SuSE/United Linux or BSD due to unanswered questions wether M$ OSes have secret US-"No such Agency" backdoors built in or not.
Allthough keeping in mind that germany has been blowing 500 Million Euro since the eighties on building a new military IT strukture that still may take a while....
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Hackerdom easily tolerates a much wider range of sexual and lifestyle variation than the mainstream culture. It includes a relatively large gay and bisexual contingent. "
/. post is just about equivalent to using "big ass nigga", alright, it's going to not only offend people, it's also going to make people feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.
-- The Jargon File
Please, guys, think before you type. I don't care what you're trying to say, but using the words "big ass faggot" in a
Translation: Yes, Microsoft is raking in a ton of money again.
We have the total amount, we have the number of computers, we can compute the cost per machine. All the licensing shit does is spin it.
From my experience in software purchases, when a government organization wishes to purchase licenses for software, they do so when the following criteria have been met:
1) Do we get training (if necessary)?
2) Do we get 24 hour support (if necessary)?
3) Do we get notified of any security problems as soon as they happened (if necessary)?
4) Will this integrate well into our current network and systems framework?
5) Is it compatible with our existing data files that we've been using for years now?
Although Red Hat and SuSE have been making headway into enterprise level products, they have been doing so targeting the server arena, not necessary the desktop arena. Both Red Hat and SuSE are adept at writing utilities to manage and configure their server products, but the end-user applications are not under the control of either of the companies. As such, it would be expensive for open source companies to take on the responsibility of training and integrating their own packages included with their own distributions as well as Microsoft integrates their own applications with their operating systems.
I am not advocating Microsoft's business practices. However, they do have an extraordinary business model of "we have the best to support the software most widely used in the industry". It works and has made their products a lucrative business for both government and private industry. The government's expenditure on Microsoft's licenses is small considering the amount of businesses (in private industry) that have purchased licenses (OS, applications, utilities, support, etc.) for their employee base. The government made Slashdot news because it is the government.
If, say, for instance the KDE folks would support their software by offering in-depth training, 100% compatibility with Microsoft products, and installation/troubleshooting support they would be a contender.
Most things in the government: it's not necessarily the price because often then not you get what you pay for. Convenience and saving time is worth the extra money for the powers that be. A new company that is dedicated to such type of desktop support to spearhead Linux into the arena where people are used to clicking the little "E" logo is definitely needed.
Ayup
And remember folks, that's our money.
Is there anyone on Slashdot that hangs onto Windows for anything other than games?
Work.
Yep, it's called the "Real World." Don't get me wrong: I like open source, *nix and the rest as much as the next guy, but when you work for a company, odds are it'll be M$. At home I can be as l33t as I want, but at work, you get what you get.
-Valiss
Is there anyone on Slashdot that hangs onto Windows for anything other than games?
I use it so that I can utilize all the windows software that I 'borrowed' from my employer.
the Good Enough Diploma!!!
Now hear this: the US military DOES NOT USE MS WINDOWS BOXEN TO CONTROL NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Or, any sort of weapon for that matter. The military, like most large institutions, has a need for office automation apps, e-mail, and the like. And for this, they use Windows and Office.
So they use Windows to order, ship, track, inventory, order deployment of, etc. nuclear weapons. Also MREs, toilet paper, and all the other supplies necessary for a deployment - and whose quantities and destinations are secret, because, if you're sending X amount of toilet paper to Borneo, it means you're sending Y amount of troops to Borneo.
So what happens when it's time to send troops against one of our likely future enemies, or one of their clients. And suddenly a wave of shiny new blended-threat self-propagating worms from their info-warefare department floods through the Army's half-million desktops, emailing/ftping/whateveing the info to the other side and then wiping essentially every office computer in the U.S. Army?
Rember:
- Microsoftware holds the record for security vulnerabilities.
- Microsoft showed the source code to the info-warfare department of every major non-US power recently (to "satisfy them of its security").
Meanwhile it does NOT show source to the U.S. academic-community software security specialists - who wouldn't look anyhow due to non-disclosure requirements. Requirements which, of course, are a total joke to a foreign infowar department.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, I've been to Le Bourget last week-end (you know ? the only place in the world where american military planes don't fly).
...
...simply because everyone is using it !!! .
:-((
And I have seen what kind of job normal people in the army (not speaking about warriors) do. A friend of mine is working in the business.
In the French army (which might not be the most advanced in the world...), they use integrated software that do real-time data-base mining and updating to adapt instantaneously, for instance on an airfield, the disponibility of a plane and the engines and the fioul and the crew and the date of last use and the date of next revision and the weapons and the disponibility of the airfield and
The time scale has to range from 30 mn (for fighters missions) to 5 months (for humanitary missions).
Every battlefield is different and every plane has a different engine that has to be checked at different intervals of time.
At the same time you communicate by this software with other military bases and advanced alert systems and ministry of defense...
This is a very complex task and every existing software (developped by high-tech companies like sagem or thales in France) has to be complex, safe, takes ages to develop and costs lots of money. This can't be a GNU project.
So, like CatiaV5 or other sophisticated software, they run on windows
I think one reason is the almost monopolistic position of windows on desktops which has a very stront effect on every software company
I believe Mozilla now supports NTLM.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
In a word, yes.
Firstly, I don't use Windows for games - that's what my PS2 is for. I use Windows for:
Accounting Software (Sage)
Compatability Testing
Shoutcast Server.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
You forgot the GIBob Drag-n-DropDead(TM) "technology". Open up specific mission folder and you get a bunch of target icons on the Battlefield Desktop(TM). Drag your weapon icons on top of the intended targets and Bloowie! Specially designed "Are you sure?" dialog "technology" to prevent friendly fire. Enhanced desktop shredder for those SpecialOps missions that no-one else should know about. PlausibleDeniability operating mode so you can disavow any knowledge of GIBob's actions. Comes with Version 1.0 of Skynet(TM) so multiple GIBob's can communicate with each other over the net to coordinate attacks with a click of a button.
When we (a small Medical headquarters unit) deployed we left our Windows boxes home. Personnel and Supply used Burroughs machines (some type of UNIX) to manage our stuff. These 386's were pretty tough and stood a lot more abuse than the crappy clones we left behind, except for going through a lot of floppy drives 'cause people wouldn't put the report disks in baggies like we told them. And had to keep blowing the sand out of everything. Anyway, point is that we did just fine with these boxes -- managing people and supplies and mail, doing word processing and spreadsheets -- and when we got back to Texas I used it to get a Compuserve account. The Japanese "donated" a bunch of new Windows machines during Desert Shield in lieu "real" military support (I don't blame 'em). The Colonel allocated himself the one for our unit and spent every evening mastering Solitaire and Minesweeper. This was a valuable asset in that it kept his mind occupied with something other than conjuring up new busy-work for us.
Ah, another fine example of doublethink.
You say you don't love war, and decry the killing of innocents in the same sentance.
Department of the Army Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Hotline:
DSN 225-1578
(in Virginia) 800-572-9000
800-752-9747
Phillip
Well if you had bothered to read his post dumbass *he* was saying that if *someone else* thought that they could sit in a foxhole and hack into a system while *he* was shooting at them, *he* bets the *he* would run out of ammo before that *someone else* managed to turn off the lights via hacking.
And *he* is right.
but there's obviously something more there than an operating system.
If you believe that, I've got a $600.00 toilet seat you might be interested in.
(I hope I'm not showing my age.)
Read, L
Not me, I barely use Windows for that now that I have WineX working pretty darn good. Rebooting to play a game for 30 minutes was pretty irritating, and I don't miss it at all.
I can't afford a sig!
they only want to use what they are comfortable with. And for 95% of the graduating class that's windows.
I was enlisted in the Navy, and I can't ever remember anyone asking me what tools I would prefer. In fact, I remember quite distinctly being taught that i would use "whatever damn tools we tell you to use" or something similar, but with more swearing and less concern for any opinion that I may or may not have held (but obviously I did not hold any opinions, because if any one of my superiors got the notion that I did hold such an opinion there would have been hell to pay).
This Army that you develop software for certainly sounds like a nice place, with all of this concern over what operating system might the enlisted folk prefer and such. It warms my heart to know how much things have changed, and instills in my mind great confidence in our leaders to know that they will not let silly notions about stability, efficiency, cost, and especially security get in the way of allowing our elisted men work in the computer operating environment of thier choice.
Read, L
-If tax cuts are coming, the clinics and shelters should also stop whatever wasteage that they are plauged by. They too should not have copies of windows on their accounting machines, or be overstaffed.
Most smaller clinics and shelters are already accustomed to running on a budget. When your existance is based on the generosity of others, you kinda have to. (Big guys like the Red Cross are another story) But when the money stops coming completely, it doesn't matter how efficient they are, there's nothing to work with.
Why do retards need school anyway? Not that I don't care about their welfare, but what could school provide for them that home could not?
Many of the kids in these programs could be fairly functional members of society if they are taught some behavioral skills and educated as much as they possibly can be. Do you want to pay this kid's rent the rest of your life because he's on permanent social security, or would you like to see him actually get a job washing dishes are picking up trash somewhere? Plus, many of the kids in these programs are borderline...they're not quite suited for regular school but witht he proper attention could do just fine. Our public schools aren't equipped to deal with them and they will just disrupt the learning process for these kids. They still deserve a chance, though.
Oh, and most parents of these kids have neither the ability nor the desire to teach them what they need. They can't get this kind of education at home because their parents don't know what to do, or can't be bothered to do it.
And the same common sense applies to schools as it does for the military and to social programs. If there's wasteage it needs to be fixed. (For example, why do the upper management of the school boards need to be paid so much?? Why are teachers who fail to perform allowed to remain just because their union is protecting them?)
I couldn't agree more. Not all teachers should be in their positions. But why punish the good ones? However, it does take a certain caliber of person to lead. Upper management makes a lot of money there for the same reason they do in the private sector: there'd be no incentive to take on the responsibility if there wasn't reward for it. Of course, there should be more accountability to match that salary, both in the coporate and nonprofit sector.
crazy-talking-to-himself-bums don't deserve shelter? I think they do!
I could have worded that better...they most certainly do merit shelter. The main argument I get when I discuss the homeless topic is "Tell those fucking bums to get jobs!" Most people are under the delusion that the scary guys begging for money are the only homeless people in their city, when in fact they are less than 10%. I suppose I was anticipating that response from readers and jumped the gun there.
I'm more afraid of the bums who decided booze is more fun than work and the government gives them a free ride so they take it. More wasteage that could have went to good social programs but instead put bread in the mouth of some drunk who deserves nothing.
It doesn't really work that way. The money doesn't get handed to these guys. It goes to shelters that provide them meals and warmth. Sure, most of them aren't going to ever use these facilities to help themselves get anywhere better, but this type of shelter costs next to nothing to run. The more expensive shelters are the ones that carefully screen their residents and/or monitor them once they are admitted. If they're not actively working to better their position (find housing, find jobs, etc) then they're back in the street with a quickness. These are the ones that really make a difference, and these are the ones that are closing.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Neally half a billion to MS for licenses & equipment in this one agreement alone? I'm glad I don't live in the US, but if I did I'd seriously consider contacting my congressman or senator about this deal. From the few details made public so far, it looks like the DoD really didn't negotiate that hard for the best deal for taxpayer $$$. I'd be more than a little steamed, considering that with a purchase of this magnitude there is a great deal of negotiating power, now that there are secure alternatives; power that apparently wasn't used. It almost sounds like a subsidy. Would Americans let this issue fade away without investigation?
Then the only viable solution for a large portion of Slashdotters would be to...pirate the English language!
Arrrgghh!!!
-phish
Sorry,
I FULLY DISAGREE! Yes, I work in the industry too and all I can say is MOST of the problems are MICROSOFT (and poorly trained IT staff). Word crashes on a daily basis, DLL hell... Why are the servers on site rebooted once a week? I'll tell you... Reliability in MS sucks!!!
We used to run Solaris. We had one reboot in 4 years!!!!! Now we've gone to Microsoft, we've lost the email server twice in 3 years (and that includes ALL of the emails for that timeframe) and we've had at least one server failure every 2 months. FYI, it took 5 days each time to get the emails coming back in again.... FIVE WORKING DAYS!!!!! EACH TIME!!!!
I strongly disagree that Linux is inappropriate for the average user. 95% of the defence force use Word, Excel and Powerpoint - PERIOD! Now, Linux can hose that in easily with something like Open Office!!!
As another example of crappy Microsoft is Outlook. Everyime Windows crashes, outlook.pst becomes corrupted. This is one of many examples of the sort of support calls you receive often (I know this because I hear people complain about this one constantly).
Sorry to disagree, but the Sysadmins where I am wouldn't know if their asses were on fire. I'll take a Unix admin over a Windows bozo any day.
AC
Look up your local LUG and find out when they are scheduling the next installfest.
Free the West Memphis Three!
Yes, really amazing technology, IE is. Now take your pills and get back in your bed.
Firebird 0.6 doesn't do the double click thing. And it my experience, its as stable as Mozilla proper.
-phish
Personally, I can accept nothing less than having my nation's army be in full software licensing compliance while it bombs, invades and occupies other countries. It's the law!
-
I think you're some kind of deviated prevert. I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts.
Pork Pork Pork
rinds
liposuction for BillyG
John Ashcroft is hiding amongst us
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Say "goodbye" to Uncle Sam & "hello" to Uncle Bill!
Xe! Xe! Xe!
It's like, um, recurring post.
And which job do you have, janitor or prostitute?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Well, it's the Army, here in the Air Force, we use Red Hat and Sun Solaris around my area. Trying to train lots of grunts in the field whose sole purpose is to kill things and break stuff would not be cost effective and detract from their mission. Nothing wrong with the Windows licenses, until someone can come up with a viable way of moving a 1,000,000 person organization onto Linux.
then slashdot is drawing the wrong croud.
i need to find another site that isn't full of sheep like you.
hey former grunt.
they didn't want you hurting yourself back then (thinking)
we don't want you hurting yourself now.
Can you imagine if a serious hole is found in M$ software, how can the army patch all computers in a short time?!
I thought that's what WinNuke was for...
This would make my blood boil if I was an American taxpayer. 500 million dollars could hire or retrain 20000 junior sysadmins at $25,000/yr or 5000 for 4 years! And this is only their software purchase budget, who knows if the army already has money earmarked for labour as well.
By downloading a copy of RH 9.0 and creative use of wine and/or vmware you could easily enhance service and security for a huge part of the military and cut costs. It just goes to show that indiscriminate military spending is just as bad as indiscriminate social spending.
Because when I tried using netscape, all the java was broken (in my opinion) as none of my internet banking services worked any more. The tabbed browsing was great, but when I couldn't do the things I wanted to do I had to change back to IE.
Oh well, at least we know how much they could save by switching to open source.
Ok this is HearSay/Second hand, but what I had heard was that a general was expalining 10000 $400 toilet seats is actually a way of putting $390,000 into a black ops budget, i.e. things that for security (or more nefarious reasons) you can't list as a line item in your appropriations budget.
For those old enough to remember: FTA
i wish slashdot would publish their impressions % broken down by OS used so people like you could STFU about using linux all the time when it comes in at 5% used.
Yes, I know they specified auto because they want it to work reliably no matter who, and no matter what.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
They should have bought 494,000 $900 hammers. At least they would have something useful to show for it. And what do you want to bet some of the $471,000,000 ends up in the Bush Re-Election Campaign's coffers?
Arch that back! I said ARCH THAT BACK!
What kind of pig are you, what kind of pig would do that? Babys a human toilet.. Babys a human toilet!!! Say it! Say your a human toilet. I am going to send you home to mommy bleeding from the asshole.
COME ON, YOU PEOPLE. YOU CHEAP PENNY CUNTS. YOU WORTHLESS SLUTS. YOU CHEAP WHORES. YOU REALLY ARE DISGUSTING, YOU REALLY ARE. [Can I fuck your virgin asshole bitch? I know you are hard at the thought of it!] WHAT'S THIS? WHAT'S THIS? YOU LIKE THAT, DON'T YOU? LOOK AT THAT. BEGGING FOR IT. COME ON DOWN AND BEG FOR IT, BABY. FUCKING WHORE!
And you're not blocking CSPAN?
HELP!! My tv crashes when the adds come on! (now if I could just get a keyboard hooked up to it)
Surely you're not suggesting any large media news group isn't going to have slanted coverage, or that Anna Banana really loves Hot Todd Turnon and his 7 twin brothers just because she said so in "8 isn't enough".
At home, I only use Windows because of games.
At work (today was first day working at an ISPs comp repair bench), my computer runs Windows. I *might* install the latest and gratest distrobution of Mandrake, but I may also keep Windows on the box, simply for the sake of testing procedures (if customer asks what menus to click on Outlook express, I can tell them). Perhaps I will install Cygwin, or perhaps I may give into the temptation of Mandrake.
Theres a few slackware guys where I work.. better be careful or the command prompt will own me (more than it already does)!
I assure you autopr0n.com works perfictly well on most browsers and OSs!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The DoD paying more than necessary? Say it isn't so. Life's rough when you have to find some way to spend $1.17 BILLION (US) every day.
Why isn't Tony Stanco complaining about this?
and there's not that much money left. If it's a 6 year contract, I think Microsoft is just breaking even on it.
Yep. And happy too.
:)
Windows does everything I want it to. I'd rather not take the time to configure a distro to suit my needs.
And I won't ever go back to debugging with GDB
I'll grant that it's a bit more work (which might dissuade some folks), but you can just install an NTLM proxy on your system.
May we never see th
Am I the only one here who got the Linux/Oracle ad on this page saying:
"Want to know how you can save millions?"
It's better than Outlook, and it's better than recent Media Player releases. That's about as far as I'll go.
May we never see th
Use Control-L. I use it all the time in Galeon. Works a wonder.
May we never see th
Linux has a Shoutcast server (as well as Icecast).
Sort of by its nature isn't good for Windows compatibility testing, though.
May we never see th
I've used more debuggers than I can count on my fingers, and while gdb isn't the best out there, I can't stand GUI debuggers. I haven't used any CLI Windows application-level debuggers.
May we never see th
Of some IT people: if users can't use Windows then they will stop using computers if forced to do something else, oh yes, [tm].
I have not seen evidence of this, but some people repeat it like a confirmed truism.
In my personal experience, people that are not computer savvy do not care what they are using as long as what they have to do is explained on clear terms. Computer savvy people may roll their eyes ocassionally for taking them out of their comfort zone, but they carry along doing their work just fine.
Explain that the money saved would have to be cut from other places otherwise (i.e. redundancies) and you will have the most willing learners you can imagine.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What stupid assertion.
Show us their balance sheet and their operational accounts wise boy...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It appears you are trying to kill someone, would you like help with that? o Yes, kill them, kill them all o No Thanks I'll gut them myself.
It does seem the military could become the prime funder of open source with very little effort, as it is most likely heavily used already. All that is needed is a few more trolls, I mean ask slashdots, like this one and my company, er I mean the open source community, will quickly accumulate a critical mass of information about U.S. Army procurement procedure to swiftly overtake Bill / make so much money it needs scientific notation / significantly improve oss / hire some professional documentation writers (pick one or more).
This has got to be one of the most intersting threads to get posts from people in the military, really. Maybe someone with some experience could provide more concrete information how to get oss' foot in the door, i.e. books/sites to study, areas of need, specific cases where oss is already used, etc. From the outside one would think that the military's gung-ho/can-do spirit would embrace superior options if they should exist, do not cost too much to introduce, and are well supported. How does OSS get into the next procurement cycle and grab a piece of the next half-bil or whatever is invested? Open Source does run on Windows you know, and it doesn't *have* to suck.
I FULLY DISAGREE! Yes, I work in the industry too and all I can say is MOST of the problems are MICROSOFT (and poorly trained IT staff). Word crashes on a daily basis, DLL hell...
Part of the problem is design of Windows which allows (even expects) the end user to carry out admin tasks. Even though the NT derived versions of Windows have file system protection often this needs to be turned off to enable any application which was written on the assumption it can do what it likes to work...
A lot of problems just cannot happen when the end user (or a program run by them) cannot modify all sorts of things which don't need changing in the first place.
I strongly disagree that Linux is inappropriate for the average user. 95% of the defence force use Word, Excel and Powerpoint - PERIOD! Now, Linux can hose that in easily with something like Open Office!!!
Other common activities are email and web browsing. These can be set up to "just work" with Linux. As opposed to expecting the user to know what POP3, IMAP, SMTP, proxy servers, their own email address, etc are.
What a waste of money. Think, tehy also need another 400+ million to secure the devices.
It is a reasonable assumption to think this is the case. Off the shelf systems are with Windows and office preinstalled and then the united states military needs a fresh military previewed version so they do pay twice. If this is the case.
But they may be buying them for non-critical functions or buying blank consumer hardware.
Or buying systems with GASP SCO Unixware preinstalled.... (Said for ironys sake) or HPUX or Solarus or what ever operating system they feel they need to get the job done.
I don't actually exist.
I would have to agree that bottom line and practicality MS is the right choice. I stated so. No need to repeat that. I merely stated that Linux proponents have their say and trying to stomp on their viewpoints won't win any votes.
Does it realy matter if the "unpractical" are heard? Yes. If you are considering a purchase of a honda civic does it really matter to you that there are mercedez-benz' in the world?
If you've been around since the days of Windows3.1 I don't understand where you've failed to grasp the concept of how this operating system was designed, developed and continues to carry inherent flaws that impede its acceptance among those that would strive for better kernel core and memory access design principles (not to mention software development practices), and would attempt to convince those working in such organizations that we trust to strive for excellence.
I'd say I'm a pretty reasonable judge of how stable or secure Windows is since I've seen it through many iterations.
Compared to other versions of windows? Please explain.
The functions that are performed by a majority of windows users in the army may or may not be critical. However it is apparent that you have little grasp of security policy concepts if you think
[1] Windows can be just as secure as Linux. Let me give you just a small example: Most of the virus alerts have iterated repeatedly, "Linux and Macs are immune to this threat.". You wanted bottom line? There's a bottomline for you.
[2] Just because Windows has received Rainbow book certification for security, that this makes it secure. It only certifies that the controls, mechanisms and tools are there to make it so. It does not provide any measure of comfort since it states nothing about whether the implementation or actual use can be achieved. If you design a lock and a key device but provide no doors that have a frame to fit the lock, its useless. *nix has had the mechanisms for a very long time, developers have a long history of experience with it, must deal with it all the time (to some annoyance), and is far more visible and pervasive.
[3] Security of noncritical systems do not affect the security of critical systems in the network vacinity. This is the number one goal of hackers and viruses. Get your foot in the door by finding an open one. Cracking into a secure one can then procede from the open one.
What, you thought you could just take an out-of-the-box Linux install and be good to go? Come on.
Default security of default installs of Windows and Linux compared, I would pick Linux over windows any day. Neither being secure (there is no secure, there is less secure, and there is more secure), you think out-of-the-box has no impact on the final configuration? YOU cmon. We all know what the person installing it should do, go through a checklist and assure that measures and compliance to contract and procedures, blah blah blah. We all know how it ends up though. Want a real reality check?
You've made no alotment for human behavior and statistical probability of errors. Something that I expect military institutions to be astute in ascertaining.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
Right. Well, I did read his post, dumbass, and if you had bothered to think while reading mine, you'd understand that I am saying, "What the hell does a hypothetical that never has happened or will happen have to do with anything?" See, he was claiming some sort of authority because he was a "former grunt", and I was calling that into question by pointing out that his silly concocted example had no relationship to anything he, or any other grunt, had had to deal with. Next time I'll spell it out in a long boring paragraph full of small words so you'll understand. And I'll be sure to emphasize every other word with asterisks.
Nobody is "hacking" in a foxhole under fire. If anyone is using a computer under those conditions at all, it's to glance briefly at some app displaying tactical info. Maybe. The Army does a lot of things bass-ackwards, but one thing they're pretty good with is what you should be doing in a foxhole while being shot at. Using a keyboard is not on the list.
That would be a cool feature to add to Slashcode, actually... imagine a button to show you the browser/OS histogram for any individual story. Analyze which platform correlates to interest in other topics, or predict future desktop software trends.
A more invasive version (but still cool) would be to get a browser history of a certain user. (Of course, that's easy to fake)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Microsoft deal is for 6 years - the equipment for 3. Sounds to me like the $951 figure may include software updates. Or perhaps provisions for future hardware purchases.
Funny. Both my wireless and winmodem work under Linux.
Can't get it to work for me. New 1.4 doesn't do anything differently than before.