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?"
Wait... I liked Highlander II.
The FBI uses OS X, why won't the military consider it?
And no, it's not because of the don't ask don't tell policy.
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)
I've had to put my 6 year old on her own machine because her kiddy games makes Windows unstable, but my wife and myself both run tons of "mainstream" software, ranging from Doom to UT to banking software to Eclipse to video editing software.
My machine doesn't lock up and it doesn't crash and neither does hers.
If the Navy gets a cut of Windows with all the games cut out and they remove the ability for the field user to install the junk apps, they might have something very useful (in a work environment... not for home users)
Agile Artisans
Hey, contractors.... I have a job that needs to be done.
I also have $1,000,000,000 to throw at the problem. Any contractors that have the ability to accept and be responsible for receiving a pre-payment, please step forward.
Sorry, only top tier contractors will be accepted.
Oh, Sorry again. Because of a new requirement added by Congress, only the largest company in this industry will be allowed to submit a bid. And only one bid will be accepted. We don't have time to evaluate other solutions.
I'm glad Microsoft are getting the full value of their PAC contributions, I'd hate to think our government was dishonest
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Go back and reread it.... this is a custom "solution". You just can't go wrong with one of those.
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.
My win 2k is more stable than my redhat 9 and my buddies mandrake 10.1. So I'd be careful about throwing around accusations about "stability." Oh and it's easier to do more too. Just is.
...Suck, and it's brought to you by the new Halliburton That Doesn't Screw America.
Thanks for playing.
CNET News.com and ZDNet.
/. (rejected) on 11/19/2004.
"The Air Force is consolidating its 38 software contracts and nine support contracts with Microsoft into two all-encompassing, agencywide agreements, according to a statement seen by CNET News.com.
The contract, done in conjunction with Dell, will call for the installation and configuration of software as well as ongoing maintenance and upgrades. The deal, which includes 525,000 licenses of Microsoft's Windows and Office, is valued at $500 million over six years, according to Microsoft."
Posted this on my AQFL Web site and even submitted to
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
USAF Version
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
I hope that this "extra security" means that they'll remove some of the cruft that Windows has (such as Internet Exploder, LookOut! Express, and Media Player), and focus their energy on things that would make Windows have some respectable form of security (such as a decent firewall and better user/admin. handling).
Widely used, mission-essential, net-centric software will be managed and supported with disciplines similar to those used with weapon systems.
Does anyone have an English translation available?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
that the air force DOES IN FACT TRAIN PEOPLE TO CODE why on earth would they use a "microsoft" solution when there are plenty of open source / free alternatives ? Granted they don't have to release all the juicy tidbits (read: top secret) but this just a waste of tax dollars. In other words, stop traing them for ADA, and train them for C/C++ etc!
Now I don't have to worry about boarding a jet anymore, but just look up at the ones crashing into my home... Not that the jets themselves are run on Windows, but its just a thought. Hey Microsoft, I am a member of the Air Force too! Where can I pirate, uhhmm, download, my version?
_
Free 27" Sony WEGA TV
Hey I guess it worked, you got "insightful". Let's see if I can try...
Did Netcraft confirm it yet?
In Soviet Russia operating systems buy the Air Force!
"The Linux community likes to hide behind the mantra of free and open software for all and as such has the twisted mindset that all software should be free for everyone. This should come as no surprise seeing that the Linux community seems to take pride in stealing anything they can get their hands on and breaking laws designed to protect IP at the same time." Linux is flat out a great OS, one that is truly customizable and flexable. And Open Source Software isn't just great because it's free - but it's great because there are more and more people every day with an interest in actually making it better. For example - MOZILLA. I don't mind paying for good software. What I am tired of doing is paying so much for hyped software only to discover it is crap wrapped in a bow. Linux on the other hand has beyond what XP can do... The latest Distros out there are so good, and so easy to use... and OO.o has become so much better, there really is no reason at all to have to pay such inflated prices for Microsoft's crap. I admire what Bill Gates was able to do with his little company and little actual tallent... but that doesn't mean I have to buy his crap. The only good product MS has made is Flight Simulator, and Combat Flight Simulator. But my god do they have a vanilla name. It's like Ford coming out with a new 2005 Model "Car".
MadOgre.com
What I'd really like to see is a case of the Marine Corps using Linux -- then when someone was doing outright bashing thereof, I could instruct them to "tell it to the Marines."
95% of the classified systems I've run into are running *nix (in one flavor or another) The systems on my base are proposing to switch to RedHat in the next year. It's not all Windows
Guess you should have made fun of Highlander II. =)
Why the hell did the U.S. government even bother with SELinux if they won't use it?
These single size fits all solutions are typical of the military. The concern Ihave is that the Justice Department is not reviewing these contracts in view of the anti-trust law suits that MS lost. Additionally, the government and the military are supposed to aviod the appearance of backing a single company yet it would appear the the DOD is firmly in bed with Microsoft, Dell, and EDS. I would encourage all the readers of Slashdot to write their Congressional representatives and the President of the U. S. demanding an accounting of how each piece of these contract was justified.
How about a federal regulation prohibiting the government from doing business with a convicted monopolist? Hell, if felons can't vote, why should felonious corporations benefit from government contracts?
Also Linux is not a good fit for applications such as Global Command and Control System (GCCS) which is a Unix/Windows product (Solaris servers, Windows clients and servers). This is of course if the AF chose to port the applications to another OS, which would take years (look up Common Operating Environment) to meet all of the usability requirements, nevermind the security ones. All I can say is putting your eggs in one basket is not a good idea.
From an interview with Air Force CIO John Gilligan, "Do we like what the Navy is doing? Apart from the fact that it's all one big contract, yeah, there are a lot of good things about that. As you may know, they're struggling on some areas -- it's gone a lot slower than they would like, the contractor is having problems, etc. -- so that is why I am caveating the statement. Would we do it exactly that way? No. Do we plan in the future to outsource increasingly some of our infrastructure? Yes. In fact, I'm looking for us to begin that dialogue with industry in earnest about nine months from now. "
I wonder what changed his mind?
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.
Worse, the sheer size of the NMCI contract pretty much precludes anyone but EDS from handling it. So what happens if their service levels suck? Or they go bankrupt from trying to juggle changeover?
Man, I didn't like Highlander 2 as much as the next guy, but the article summary was kick in the nuts out of nowhere. Isn't there a statute of limitations on crappy movies? Does a time ever come when we can forgive them?
Highlander II? What are you talking about? There was no Highlander II. Even the writer and director of Highlander III admited there was never a Highlander II.
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.
Of course there are a lot of desktop apps too, but the Air Force does run a lot of critical shit. However, most of those servers run some form of Unix or a mainframe OS. Some run Windows, but those are not the big ones that need lots of speed and runs millions of database transactions per day.
The Air Force is Microsoft's single largest customer, according to the speech Ballmer gave to us about a year ago. It is no wonder that the only way not to have a Windows desktop is to be a developer for a Unix system. As a whole, the Air Force is dead set on having a single sign-on web-based portal system (ASP), using Active Directory to run all the communications.
Not only are they moving toward locking the whole Air Force into proprietary Microsoft technology, they are consolidating services into a single point of failure. If a terrorist could take out a single data center, they could essentially take out the whole Air Force. Yeah, the planes might be able to fly, but where would the generals get their information? How would mechanics keep track of what needs to be done to the thousands of fighter jets, making sure that routine maintenance is done on time? Military hardware takes a beating, and computers track all that stuff. One dirty bomb. One pickup truck full of fertilizer. It could disable "the greatest air force on earth."
No, I will not say which datacenter I am talking about, I do not want Ashcroft's goons to drag me away to Guantanamo ;-)
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Bill Gates could take a dump in a box and label it "Microsoft Windows SE (Shit Edition) 2005" and people would line up in droves to buy it. As long as an operating system has "Microsoft Windows" in the name, people will believe that they have to run it-- that if they don't, the world will end, or their computer will blow up, or they'll be confronted with an 80x25 greenscreen full of text, or something...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Thanks for playing.
Sorry. You seem to have mispelled that. Here. Let me correct it.
Thanks for paying.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I was at a recent all-hands meeting of the Range personnel at a Navy base (Point Mugu) that I work at. The head of the group said that we all have to work more efficiently and he was open to any suggestions about anything except NMCI. This was because the Admiral (don't ask me which one because I don't remember) considers NMCI an incredible success!!
Now anybody that works on a Navy facility that already had PCs and was forced to use NMCI knows that NMCI is an impediment to progress. I'm sure the first suggestion someone was going to make was to get rid of NMCI. The PCs are slow, and crash often because of changes pushed onto them by the network. The service is slow (as in "months to get something done"), and of course, Windows 2000 isn't the solution to every problem.
So the question to anyone out there is "Why would the admirals think it's a success?".
Is some group of people in the Navy actually better off now that NMCI is here?
Is NMCI meeting some special need the Admiral has?
Did they get kick backs from EDS or Microsoft?
Have they been co-opted by foreign nationals or aliens intent on overthrowing the U.S.?
Please post a response if you know the answer
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
Why didn't the Air Force at least evaluate these products to see if their situation was one in which they would work?
two words: intense lobbying.
uhh, yea it is for lack of trying. Who the hell in their right mind would want to show up on THIER radar?
:-)
When I worked with State Farm Insurance, they had a highly customized version of Windows NT and MS Office. They also had a major part of the source code to both. THis was about 5 years ago. My understanding is that this is pretty common for large customers of MS products. And to answer, the next question. No, they were NOT more stable. In fact, they appeared to crash more frequently.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
You like many miss the fact that OOo is not MS word, and does not have an official bless by MS file format tool to handle .doc files. It doesn't matter how close it might ever be (still way off in my book). If it's not an official deal, it's a no go for the military and most any company. Companies and the Gov. have mountains of files in MS office file formats. They are never going to chance some geek hack with them. They need them to work, and they need to insure what OOo creates works with MS windows since thats what others use.
This is a simple cut and dry reason why people will never go to an open source alternitive, and I highly doubt MS will ever contribute such a key peice to Open Office.
Furthermore, the airforce probably did look at other things, but they were quickly toss for simple reasons like having to retrain users (think about how many people the military has), things like file compatibility, missing apps, their custom apps would need to be re-written and so forth.
Its one thing to look at linux if say you are looking at getting your first computer systems, but once you get the ball rolling, it's very hard to change. That or you can simply look at what it says about linux if even when people get feed up with windows they stick with it compaired to the other options.
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
When the Navy having their bout with "Blue Screen Of Death", at least their ships still floats.
On the other hand, when the Air Force pilots getting "Blue Screen Of Death" on their fighter planes, that'd be the last thing they ever see.
The pencilpushers who chose Windoze over other more reliable system won't have to tackle the problems the frontliners have to face.
I have much sympathy for the poor grunts.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
AUTOMATED UPDATES???????
*gibber*. the US military is happy for _microsoft_ to push automated updates onto 500,000 windows desktops???
what did i miss. is there something i haven't quite understood?
Let's start with the easy one:
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.
I call bullshit. B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.
You only see the 1/4 memory space IE uses because the rest of it is incorporated into the OS. If core Firefox components were incorporated into Windows the way IE is, it would show less memory usage than IE does.
Now I wouldn't even say that I'm a linux user. I don't have it installed at home (though I have three distros at my fingertips should I choose to install it), but I guess I do use it a lot at work and elsewhere.
But I can put up a linux box of any flavor, attach it to the network, lock it down in minutes, and not worry about it being compromised. But when I put up a Win2k (or ME or 98 or XP) box and attach it to the network, I don't even have time to download the patches before the box has been compromised. What's more, there are some vulnerabilities which MS has decided aren't worth fixing. Now for me, Mr. Technical Home User, that's one thing, and I can deal with it. But for the Air Force? Do we really want nuclear missile defense systems multitasking as spam relays? Or DDOS zombies?
So you want to talk about using the right tool for the right task? When, in anybody's universe, has the tool for SECURITY been MICROSOFT?
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
Blah, blah, blah. You talk a good line of shit, but, alas, that's all it is: shit. You have no idea how the military's tactical computer systems work or you wouldn't have spewed that odiferous blather. Give your anti-Microsoft zealotry a break and quit making up stuff in order to sound like you know what you're talking about. I know that you don't and you know that you don't.
You may be a troll, but I'll bite. First of all, I am not anti-Microsoft, I am anti-monoculture. If the Air Force picked Red Hat as the desktop OS of choice, I would object. Same with MacOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, whatever. Diversity is key.
"The military" is a broad term. I have been working in Air Force IT for over four years now, developing database applications deployed world-wide for a variety of tasks from maintenance to intelligence. Notice I make no claims about the Army, Marines or Navy. Only the Air Force, where I know first hand how things work. I know how the pieces of the IT puzzle fit together, and I am upset by what I see. All of these critical database systems that handle the Air Force's data are consolidated in a few locations. Yes, a single truck bomb could severely cripple the Air Force. If you are so smart, you tell me where to detonate it.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
The military plans so that there is no single point of failure.
Yes, in some ways, but in others they do not. I don't know about the other branches, but the Air Force is pushing for consolidated IT. For example, the application I currently work on runs on a server in a building with about 500 other applications. Not all are critical to day to day or combat operations, but enough are that a single terrorist incident could cause catastrophic loss of mission capability. Sure, we would be able to fix it, but it would take long enough that terrorists or foreign governments could attack in the window of opportunity and have better chances of succeeding.
Couple that with the fact that countries such as China are training teams of hackers to wage computer warfare, and maybe terrorists don't even need to detonate a car bomb to take our systems out.
The military have a joke that if someone took out the Pentagon they would be doing them a failure by eliminating a lot of red tape. They won't relly completely on anything. Datacenter get destroyed and they will work around it.
That is a different thing altogether. If the command and control was taken out, we have backup plans (e.g. NORAD) to take command. Besides, most mission critical systems are not located in Washington, D.C. There are a few data centers scattered around the nation, and any backup command center would still use the same data centers. That was my point, although I agree with what you said.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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.
You highly doubt there were good, open document formats... such as RTF, perhaps? Or TeX? Or HTML? Or even plaintext?
Seriously, who really needs fancy, complicated formatting? Especially, who in the government needs it? I can't think of any use, other than a 13-year-old girl's art project, that could possibly need formatting complicated enough that RTF or HTML can't do it. Can you? Moreover, any document where formatting is that important ought to be made with TeX anyway!
Government documents ought to be plaintext. If that's not feasible, they should at least use semantic formatting, which in my experience isn't MS Word's strong suit.
Granted, I can see where they'd be justified in using a proprietary spreadsheet program, since AFAIK there hasn't been a standard format until OpenOffice (they have standardized it, right?). But that's no excuse for using other proprietary stuff too.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If that's still too old-fashioned for you, how about plaintext, TeX, RTF, HTML, or XML (in chronological order)? Seriously, there was never a time when an open file format wasn't available.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Even before I installed Firefox (Firebird, Phoenix, whatever), I didn't have Spyware, or if I did, it was minimal.
The key is being aware of your environment. Turn things off that you don't need, don't use, or are harmful. If you must use cookies, set them to only accept from the originating site (bye bye DoubleClick cookies). Turn off Javascript. If a website REQUIRES Javascript, don't use it. There are certainly alternatives out there. Browse only sites you know and trust (this goes back to my pornography statement).
The next step is to use alternative software, like Firefox, Thunderbird, OO.org, and whatever else. If not to support the Open Source community, but to use programs which won't automatically start running code because you received a file that told it to.
Use a goddamned Firewall. You can pick up a SOHO hardware firewall for $20 these days. There's no excuse to not have one.
To conclude, I have one thing left to say, keeping in mind that the following sentence is completely true:
I have not had a virus infection on any of my computers (and I have dozens of computers) since 1996, and I got that by using a floppy disk in a public DOS6/WFW computer without virus protection. This virus ended up on a computer I had for no more than a week. This was my lesson in using virus protection.
Well, my point is that no matter how good the results might look, a proprietary format is never the best tool for the job, by the very fact that it's proprietary! This is clear just from the fact that being able to view the document is more important than how good it looks when you do. QED.
Remember, it's the government. Accessibility, even to those who don't have or can't use Word (or any other particular program), matters. Do you think they hypothetical blind person doing a FOIA request is going to be happy when they can't read the document because it breaks their text-to-speech software or braille display?
Finally, regarding HTML: this proverbial town apparently isn't big enough for both of us, since I refuse to use DOC. I use HTML, and sometimes "print" it to PDF. For example, if you want my resumé, you can have it in HTML, plaintext, or PDF. If you only take DOC, I don't want to work for you.
HTML really is the best of all worlds: I get semantic markup (notice the <em>s and <strong>s in this post), I can edit it with any plaintext editor, and I can make it look any way I want with CSS. By the way, HTML isn't just for the web anymore -- have you ever heard of the CSS directive "media='print'"?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Starting price for a PC desktop: $499
This is an old and tired argument. There is no way you can find a Mac laptop or desktop that *starts* at a price as low as that offered by Dell or some other PC vendor. That's because Apple is not willing to drop below a certain quality point with their hardware.
As you move up the ladder in performance, you'll find plenty of high-end laptops and desktops that exceed their Mac counterparts in price.
Expense also includes a wide variety of other factors, including necessity for hardware and software support, ease and speed of peripheral deployment, time (and money) spent dealing with security and malware issues, and so on.
Comparing a bottom of the barrel PC with the lowest-priced Mac is like comparing a Dell Inspiron to an Alienware Area 51 machine.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Tough. You're wrong. Go search bugzilla, there is a bug there over 2 years old that basically says "Gecko does not release memory when you close windows or tabs". At all. That's one hell of a leak and it's never even been looked at.
Seriously, trust me on this one, I know the internals of Windows pretty well. Until you actually run IE there are no significant parts of it loaded into memory. No MSHTML, no BROWSEUI, no SHDOCVW etc. You can't see it because it's not there, not because Microsoft cunningly hid it.
Mozilla has always been a memory pig, and the developers apparently are no longer interested in that sort of profiling.
Open source isn't a panacea.
"There are a lot more airplanes at the bottom of the ocean than there are submarines in the sky"
The government should standardize on an Open format for all of the documents.
Then, any company can build a word processor that handles that format.
Only then can the best "tool" be chosen for the job.
Otherwise, if MS Word doesn't have the capabilities you need, you don't have any options because you've locked yourself into a proprietary format.