Slashdot Mirror
Air Force Orders Up A Custom Windows Monoculture
Soulfader writes "It seems that the Air Force has not learned from the Navy's folly in single-source mammoth contracts and their attendant problems, and is now working on something similar with Dell and Microsoft. Particularly interesting is the article's assertion that the Air Force is 'fed up' with Microsoft OS problems--but not enough to switch to something else. Instead, they're going to be getting a custom 'solution' of Windows products specially configured for their use. Is this the ever-hoped-for 'good' version of Windows, or more along the line of the sucks-in-new-and-interesting-ways version of Highlander II?"
Doesn't say much for Air Force Procurement. I wonder (silently to myself) how much money changed hands and who was promised what job at Microsoft when he/she retires from the Air Force.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
This confirms to me that the US will be behind the world in a few decades. I am also very sure that portions of this custom Windows will be outsourced. The Russians will get some insight to what runs the so called "greatest military machinery" in the world.
Question is: Why are the American bureucrats making mistakes such as these?
Short answer: Some official's hands must have been greased for this deal to get a "seal of approval."
Before Slashdotters mode me unfairly, I'd like to mention that it has always been the case that whenever obvious mistakes have been made, one's hands have always been found as having been greased. Numerous inquiries have shown this.
It's worth noting that massive amount of Air Force computing needs are not "critical shit". There are an awful lot of desktop machines running basic office apps to fill in reports in triplicate, make requisititons, do accounting, and all the other "needs" of any bureaucratic system.
That such problems can't be readily addressed by a nice locked down desktop distro (anything from Novell desktop 9 to Sun's Java Desktop) using OpenOffice and the like, well that's certainly up for debate. When the claim to be fed up with MS it is a little odd that they didn't even bother to evaluate the competition.
For all those out there who will say "But Linux isn't good enough on the desktop", or "OpenOffice is no replacement for MS Office", I would point out that both Linux and OpenOffice can be perfectly serviceable in some situations; Why didn't the Air Force at least evaluate these products to see if their situation was one in which they would work?
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
It's not about the stuff you install, it's about the stuff that others install for you.
Include links to IE and Outlook exploits here.
bash$
More importantly, what's wrong with a mixed shop based on requirements of the tasks. What's wrong with running Sun for your mission critical servers, NetBSD for your web and mail servers, OS X for basic business/management desktops, Linux for developer and research desktops etc. All of those will play together quite happily. It's only when you try to throw MS Windows into a heterogeneous mix that things start having issues.
Throw out Windows, and everyone else will play nice together. Seems pretty obvious as to who should go in any hetrogeneous environment.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
First of all, it's highly doubtful they are starting with no desktop computing infrastructure. If they have any inhouse applicaitons that run on Windows, that pretty much puts the ball in Microsoft's court.
Second, I imagine that such decisionmaking processes take years to complete. If they started in 2001, those fairly recent Linux desktop distros were not available. Face it, Desktop Linux faces a long long haul among large shops, and hasn't proven shit yet.
Finally, the AirForce is doing exactly what 99% of corporate America has done -- standardize on Windows desktops. I'm always puzzled why slashdot feels that government should lead the way with speculative IT projects. It makes more sense to save the taxpayer's money and stick with the known factor.
Most 'problems' I can acredit to either one of four things in the windows world.
The first and FORMOST is users. Most people do more harm to their machines in 1 day than I do in a year.
The second is bad hardware. The leet dude down the block hooked you up with some sweet ram. Well guess what that ram is flakey. There is a reason he fopped it off on you. Low priced comodity hardware is in the words of my dad 'you get what you pay for'.
The third is bad drivers. In the linux world ever hear of a kernel panic? Well I have. A bad driver can BSOD a box faster than your linux box would panic.
The fourth is crap software. That sweet looking screen saver was actually a trojan horse? Well thats nice lets see if we can fix it.
These problems are IDENTICAL in the linux world and in the windows world. The reason most of the spyware targets people who do not know better is because they usually buy what they find at best buy. Guess what they sell at best buy? There may be one or two linux setups there (doubt it). The rest are win boxen. It is the same problem linux has always had. There may be compairable software out there in the linux world. But to get TO linux you need to install everything over. Most people when *ASKED* if they want to do that say no. When forced they usually say yes.
Also get down off your horse called 'open source is better in memory' world. I have been using firefox for a few months now. It takes nearly 4X the amount of ram that IE did.
What do *I* use? Win XP, win2k... I measure my reboot times in months as well. Also before you go 'but your not patching?' I can say the same about your linux box if you have years of uptime. Also not ALL patches require a reboot. My xp boxes at home? Turn them off every day. Sometimes they even stay off for (*GASP*) more than one day. No need to be having it snork power when im not using it huh?
A properly configured linux and win box are awsome things to behold. They last next to forever. Poorly configed ones with bad hardware, a self destructive user, and a flakey driver are pains in the ass...
As for my current uptime? It is nearly 5 months at work with my win2k box... The dude next to me was nearly a year and only then because the power went out.
The next time you think 'windows sucks' get real. It is just as good as linux. There are some things it is better at. There are other things windows is better at.
Also before you flame out on me and say I am a linux basher. I use it ALL the time for the right things. Right tool and all...
This sort of crap belongs in the advocacy groups of usenet. You remind me of the old OS2 users. Sure it is a decent OS but come ON it is just an OS...
I have had the opportunity to work on some of the AF's critical applications. They all run on Sunfires running Solaris. Windows is for the desktop, unix is for the servers. The only exceptions I've seen are the Exchange servers and the domain controllers. The whole reason for going with MS for the desktops, as explained to me, is that the cost of supporting and training the unwashed masses how to use *nix shifts the TCO so far that windows turns out cheeper. Also, the AF can bulk buy PCs at rock bottom prices with windows preloaded, which turns out to be cheeper than getting custom machines with linux. Here is a link to where the AF is going on the server end: http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2003/08/0308 acton.html
I think this post is borderline trolling, but I can't be sure. In case it isn't, I wanted to pipe in with some counter-points.u mnists-item.pl?id=215. It is anecdotal, but unsurprisingly, the FBI doesn't seem to publish an official document detailing which OS's they operate and in what numbers.
One, the FBI does use Mac OS X. The article referenced by the GP is at http://www.securityfocus.com/cgi-bin/sfonline/col
Two, it doesn't matter how many el-cheapo Intel boxes you can get at Fry's from the bargain bin: what matters is how many can an institutional buyer like the Air Force get. Yeah, I think they can get a pretty good price on Macintoshes by agreeing to buy truckloads of them.
Three, the initial cost is far from the largest factor in the lifetime cost of a PC to the military. Focusing on purchase cost of a commodity good is really a case of diminishing returns. TCO is the place you want to focus.
Four, to get that large a price-differential on initial cost, you must be comparing bargain bin boxes with a Mac, or a 'typical' Dell box with the absolute highest-end Mac workstation possible. If you go apples-to-apples, feature-to-feature, you find that the price differntial between a Mac suitable for general purpose computing (iMac) and an Intel-based box from a major vendor like Dell or HP to be very small, under %10, plus/minus %15. Yeah, sometimes the Mac is cheaper.
Five, that security dig at the end of your post really sets the troll-tone for the whole message. Market share isn't installed base, please go do some research on that point. It is one of the most commonly misconstrued pieces of data that appears in technical columns. Security isn't synonymous with a lack of viruses, either, it goes well beyond that.
Lastly, cost, security and viruses are all tangential to the main question: which platform is going to actually perform with the necessary functionality, with the necessary uptime and meeting all other requirements? It may not be Mac OS X, but I really doubt its going to be Windows.
You know, I'm reading your message again, and now I'm sure: IHBT. You aren't advocating anything in your post and don't have any references to back up anything you do say. You assure us that Max (sic) would have their fair share of viruses if they had a larger market share, by which I must assume you mean installed base, but without any evidence to support the assurance. Has there been even a proof-of-concept virus for OS X? Not root kits, and not some kind of honor system virus ('Please email this shell script to all your friends and ask them to run it as root. Thank you!'), but an actual auto-execute and auto-propogate virus?
No.
Could it happen? You betcha, but the fact that it hasn't after this many years tells me that it is far from easy.
I'll assure you of this: so long as Windows is so easy to target with viruses that kids in VB classes do it for class projects, there won't be a virus issue on Mac OS X or Linux. Why would there be, when there is such a susceptible population of machines available? Even when Windows installed base drops to 30%, it will still have the majority of viruses. Why? Because its just too damn easy.
Stick that in your troll-pipe and smoke it.
If I had some ham, I'd make a ham sandwich, if I had some bread
They think this because the government has lead the way with speculative projects in general. Most citizens and companies don't have close to the amount of money the government has to spend on figuring shit out. That said, in a way, the government is where citizens can pool their money together and tackle huge projects.
The trouble is (just like in corporate environments), people don't give a shit what sort of system is used, as long as in the end, it works.
Now, most of the people on slasdot do care, because this is the sort of shit we live for. I'm sure the government gets a similar deal to what the piraters get (close to, or free), only they don't have to download ISOs, but rather get CDs shipped to them. This fact removes the "Linux is cheaper" stigma that most people will shout whenever someone dares to consider Windows as a solution. Support contracs probably come cheap too, or whatever.
As you mentioned, they'll standardize on Windows, since chances are, the majority of outside contacts use this as well. Plus, it sounds like they already use Windows on their desktops, which means they are giving Microsoft the ultimatum: Give us a working system, or we walk. Even with all those potentially cheap licenses and support contracts, it's probably a very large chunk of change, something that ideall Microsoft wouldn't want to lose. The Air Force is probably banking on the idea that Microsoft will get it's shit together and deliever a wicked fucking system.
This also gives them a choice to see how alternatives have come along during this do or die period of time.
Crap.
/rebuild, the problem goes away.
Let me repeat that so you do in fact hear it.
Crap.
I had problems with my DVD drive a while back, had to hard boot a couple times.
Guess what? XP - WHICH I DON'T EVEN USE DAILY, it's just on the machine (along with 2000 and RH 7.3) - decides not to boot when I DO want to use it. Tells me the "hal.dll" is corrupt or missing.
WRONG! The stupid boot loader is messed up, so it decides to send me on a wild goose chase looking for a perfectly good hal.dll. I do a bootcfg
Now I reboot - my AVG AV crashes on bootup.
Reboot again - the AV now works.
Now the SBC DSL PPPoE connection (using the XP client) doesn't work.
Delete that, recreate it.
Finally, XP is functional again.
This on an OS that hasn't even been USED in six months! What is it? Bit rot?
At City College, in my Windows Support class (basically an XP class), XP has trashed partitions, repeatedly loaded McAfee AV and Microsoft Office from the server, and simply keeled over on various machines. The Windows 2000 (or 2003, I'm not sure which one the instructor has installed on his server) has bogged down repeatedly (on a lousy 20-odd machine network!), the DNS server has crashed repeatedly, and all sorts of other crap occurs weekly. The instructor has decided to bone up on Linux because HE's getting tired of this crap!
Oh, it's the students' fault, is it? No, pal, it's the OS's fault for being that goddamn fragile.
Windows is CRAP - bloated, inefficient, unstable, unreliable, insecure CRAP.
Linux is crap, too - but it's FREE crap.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Call me old-fashioned, but what business does the government have using proprietary file formats anyway? I prefer to not have my government's data held hostage by a single company, thank you!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The objects you would need to control to take over the system are kernel objects which IE plays no part in managing.
Since the Win32 server moved into kernel mode (in NT4), it has its own system function table, and none of those functions are a part of IE either.
Show me ONE malware program that can install itself for all users when only a normal user runs it.
Unfortunately, Joe User already runs a mail server because his box was owned by a spammer.
English is easier said than done.
I just got out of the AF after 8 years of Avionics maintenance, and this is actually what the Air Force needs. For about the year or so before I got out, they bought an INSANE amount of Dell systems. We were running PII 350s, and 450s through 2001 or 2002 (If you were an officer, you were lucky, and had a 1.5Ghz system, but not us enlisted folks). Talk about frustrating... There is actually a lot more computer work done that just the accounting and forms that you think... everything from documentation of maintenance actions to a database, to doing the usual forms, troop performance reports, etc. Anyways, the AF has a HORRIBLE track record with software. They changed the personnel information system to a new, fangle-dangle thing, hailing it as a new wave. Unfortunately, by the time it was implemented, it was outdated, and never tested. Troops spent anywhere from 6 months to a year and a half getting paid at a lower rate, because the system wouldn't register their promotions (just one example of the poor quality of this system). If you had ever worked around the AF 'Small Computers' shop, you would know that they CANNOT handle Linux, or anything other than Windows. These people are MORONS. It got to the point that when one of my workcenter's 6 systems failed, I ended up formatting it and reinstalling Win because when the system was unrecoverable, they would rather spend 5 days running Norton AV than spending 1 hour reinstalling the OS. They always thought a virus was involved for some reason (that tells you about the quality and security of the networks, I suppose). In any case, I witnessed the incompetence first-hand, and think that, although Win sucks, the AF can't handle anything less user-friendly.