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California Should use Open Source and VoIP
Albanach writes "ZDNet is reporting that a report from independent auditors and experts has recommended that the State of California adopts open source software and Voice over IP as part of a series of moves that, the report says, could save the state $32 billion over five years. Additionally, they recommend the State establishes a centralised technology division to handle all their IT needs reducing redundancy and generating further savings."
Open Source in California Government
Does that mean that they did not have an IT department before? I quess they had one for each location/unit, but even that thought seems rediculously ludacrus.
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
Only little girlie men wouldn't learn to use FOSS.
Jah.
Jah.
And VOIP be ooh so sexy.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
So CA is going to "use open source" in order to get price breaks out of Microsoft, then?
Isn't that how these stories always end?
-Rob L Dreene
... I tend to find them:
1 7236&tid=103&tid=117&tid=185&tid=9 8
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/13/13
Must be the season for dups.
It's it's a a great great idea idea to to use use open open source source software software to to battle battle redundancy redundancy!
A: Ja, I vant centralized control of all communication, power lines, and, ummm... all armed forces.
B: But, Governor, won't the people object?
A: Ja... so, throw some buzzwords to confuse them. Like that open source thing. And add VoIP to the list. We'll call it Sky(pe)Net.
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
That this is a dupe. On the other hand think of the number of computers owned by the state of California. That's a bunch of license fees for M$ to lose, Win and Office. We can only hope.
A billion here a billion there and pretty soon your talking about real money - Sen. Everett Dirkson
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Normally state government has a lot of redundancy. Most departments/divisions/agencies ( depending on they are called in California ) are nearly autonomous units, from the director right down to the mail room people.
There are reasons FOR this, since a lot of departments are forbidden by law to share resources ( funding sources ) and information ( privacy ).
Is this stupid? Perhaps in many cases, ( not all but many ) but its the way things often work in any governmental situation.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I always find it amusing how top-heavy bureaucratic governments (even 'democratic' ones) always seem to make choices based on common sense and simple efficiency only after the steady stream of free money they're grown accustomed to suddenly dries up. This is why budget spending really should be a lot more open to peer review than it already is.
Not that the average person cares much about trifles like the multi-billion dollar gap between Windows-imbedded programs and open source, but it would be a nice token gesture.
~Tirinal
I noticed that the laws state that the judges and court rooms may use software, the the laws do not regulate how the software is used. For example, one software package made by California Family Law Report is suppose take the parents income and expensense and calculate child support amounts.
That software, DissoMaster, does not show its work on how it calculated the child support based on whatever given input. Currently, there is no way to appeal those calculation because that process is "closed." The input on the software is not verified. Anybody can enter any kind of input and have the software spit out some amount for which the court then deteremines as the amount to pay.
"The typical model for software acquisition in state government involves the purchase of closed source software solutions from the major vendors. Closed source software is any software whose source code is hidden from the public view. Under most licenses the user cannot modify the program or redistribute it."
br> I tried to contact CFLR to gain the source code to show exactly how the court erred in more than a 500 offset of the calculation. CFLR did not responde to my many attempt to contact them.
We can tell that such closed source software can be easily abused. The software didn't take in account many factors. It needs to be greatly improved. Not only does the input need to be verified, but the work needs to be shown so that parents can rebut the calculations for any factors that did not into the equation. We need to put the democracy back into the software the court uses by open source regulations and exclude privatization of such code. Any software code used in the court room needs to be as public as every other written law.
Arnold: This Microsoft software needs to be terminated. Bill Gates is a girlie-man. Say Hasta La Vista to Windows, and say hello to Linux.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
State Parks - they use Novell Groupwise and earlier this year were contemplating moving to MS Exchange; Since the Novell/SuSE deal I have been waiting for them to make the OSS move but so far no go. A lot of the IT staff are MCSE factory drones that had to "learn this Novell thing". They are hampered by spyware and caught by virii now and then.
If Novell could make embed OOO into their groupware, that would be the ticket.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Of course not. More interesting is how such an inaccurate AC post made +5 so quickly. Hello Redmond!
Because governments aren't businesses and price shouldn't be the sole criterion? Transparency for example?
Government use pushes software back into the public forums of education and function. Why shouldn't our subsidized universities produce software that everyone can use without further payment. We will always need people to customize it and explain it but we do not need Billionairs to sell it.
Government solutions should be for the benefit of all the populace. Hidden Source software resells the same solution over and over again. Why not solve it once for everyone.
The security and savings are far more than beneficial to the average voter than the millions spent by special lobby groups. I wish this was more widely known.
ls
We got a VoIP system at work a couple months ago.
I love it because I can not answer my phone and then tell the person that was trying to call that the phone system had crashed.
I also love it when it decides to just disconnect my phone conversations in the middle of a
It's like using a mobile phone, only without the convience of being wireless.
I want my POTS back. I want a phone that works when nothing else does. I want a phone with 99.99999% uptime, because it turns out that a phone with 97.2% uptime really, really sucks. You wouldn't think it, but those couple of percentage points are the difference between critical tool and useless gadget.
This would be perfect for government agencies, who really don't want any contact with the people they're supposed to be dealing with, but can't appear to be avoiding them. I see this being a major cost saver.
"Hello DMV, can I help you?"
"I just want to know..."
-click- beep beep beep beep beep
They can reduce time wasted on calls to an average of 2 seconds, all thanks to the miracle of VoIP.
My former workplace, a county government, is in the process of switching everyone over to VoIP. A lot of the employees are in one building and so sit on the gigabit backbone throughout the building. They also employed traffic shapers to make sure that VoIP traffic had priority.
Saying all that, the quality was excellent. It was rare to have any glitches, and at the time we had close to a thousand of the employees on it. I even had a Cisco softphone on my laptop that I used to make calls while connected over VPN from another country that was crystal clear.
I think, if you have the bandwidth and the sysadmins for it, it is a wonderful technology. But I wouldn't use it at home unless I had a dedicated pipe coming in.
Random Musings
When the World Trade Center, and surrounding buildings including Verizon's "7 World Trade", collapsed after the 2001 planebombings, NYC's phone system collapsed with it. Essential to managing the disaster, the NYC government's 70,000 desktop phones needed to come back ASAP. 2 days later, over 50,000 of those phones had been switched by the City's IT department, DoITT to VoIP. Shortly afterwards, that department produced a study that showed that the City's annual Verizon bill is over $100M: that's almost $1500 per phone, every year. After the 2003 blackout, and then a 1-hour Spring 2004 911 emergency switchboard outage that cost someone their life, DoITT has announced they're putting that fat Verizon contract out to bid. Despite any law requiring that, or even any precedent in the century of Verizon (by whatever name) operation of New York City's phones. NYC is currently receiving proposals for voice/data networking and moblie wireless networking projects, worth billions of dollars. The City Council (legislature) Technology in Government Committee has held public hearings on public wireless spectrum issues to ensure emergency services have access, and emergency 911 calls over VoIP service, to ensure that the move from circuit to packet switched phone calls preserves New Yorkers' service expectations. With 10-15 million people here every day, and everyone talking around the world, NYC is leading the way in planning for the transformation of VoIP. We're glad to have California along for the ride :).
--
make install -not war