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U.S. Government Prepares For Vista
IO ERROR writes "Patrick Svenburg, program manager for Windows Client Solutions in Microsoft Federal, answered questions from government IT managers today about the upcoming Windows Vista release. Many of the questions were about BitLocker, Microsoft's new drive encryption technology, as well as other security questions, upgrading from Windows XP, IPv6 deployment and more. Svenburg is a member of the Windows Vista Launch Team and is leading early adoption efforts for Windows Vista within the Federal community, according to Government Computer News."
I signed up to be a beta tester for Vista.
I make money by helping people with THEIR windows problems.
I wanted to beat the learning curve.
When Vista hits the streets I'm ready to go make money helping people.
I'm 6 months ahead of the game.
But personally, I'll stick with my Linux.
I think it's a joke that Microsoft thinks that BitLocker will allow us to more easily decommission computers. Right now we have to write the entire drive with zeros twice, then verify it. Or we can send them to be destroyed magnetically. There is no way that encryption will be considered good enough.
It'll be three years before a single agency goes vista. The testing and approval process is long and painful. DOD is just starting now to roll out XP five years after launch. There aren't compelling reasons to upgrade yet, and the third party support isn't there. Most importantly, the crappy administrators they get from learncomputersfast.com don't know how to work it yet.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
If someone had modded you up as funny, I'd let this pass. Hopefully, you were at least a bit tongue in cheek with your remark. If not...
From what I've seen over the years, research/scientific use sticks with whatever platform they need (unix flavors, linux flavors, windows or even a couple VMS'y critters). They've got good technical and legal reasons for keeping things unchanged. Most of these users either use a windows box for reporting, or generate their reports their own way and more or less ignore that they're causing other people any friction.
Everyone else is a supply chain feeding documentation to the secretary level, or interacting with the rest of the world for acquisitions. An army's only as strong as it's supply chain, or whatever cliche goes here. Further, it is staffed by people that came from jobs where they used windows. SO... all the way up the chain of command or out on the supply chain, win and office keep things simple. Shifting to OpenOffice or another mechanism occasionally doesn't work. And even a tiny amount of friction costs more than buying windows and MSOffice.
Three-letter acronyms and government employment don't change things a lickspittle: windows is ubiquitous because of inertia (both in what file formats people expect to receive and in what applications they know from non-governmental jobs).
As for Vista vs. XP, new machines will come with Vista, which will start the inertial build-up all over again.
Let me put this into a personal role. I have worked in small government groups that have tried to shift away from Windows and MSOffice. We'd have been happy accomplishing either part of that separation (OS or office suite). The OS part became a problem because I kept getting os-specific work. If I'm adding a few features to a windows app, I have to do it in Visual Studio. There's just no money or time in the allocation to unwind the app (whose documentation is stored in some vast Washington WRITE-ONLY facility, I'm told) and convert it to something platform-agnostic. Luckily, there's a lot of java coding going on. I dislike java for other reasons, but at least it is not created on windows by windows for windows... so that part gives me hope.
Next, on noncode: my other work tended to be infosec (Cybersecurity) documentation and user guides and the likes. I'll get handed a word doc, and have to revise it, edit it, or whatever. Most times, it is rife with clever formatting that improves some aspect of readability at the expense of portability. Inset textboxes of text that summarize whole pages for people too busy to read the whole document. Formatting and layout done six different ways when six other people made revisions. Dynamically-linked content. Contradictory mechanisms for indexing or page numbering or creating a TOC. Frankly, the more important documents that bring together material from multiple sources or writers or editors are as brittle as a house of cards. When we'd make the attempt to do even trivial editing in Open Office 1.x (haven't had opportunity since 2.0), stuff'd break. So, we were forced back to MSOffice. And attempts to generate the stuff we originated in Open Office hit the 'what the heck is this filetype' questions from our recipients.
We made inroads. And I install open office 2.0 on each machine I use. I use it. And so far, I'm ok... but I'm not using it in circumstances that test the limits like I mentioned above, so YMMV.
There are some efforts being made to push the federal government into high-level mandates that push the market where they need, rather than enduring what the vendors want. Out of the box security has a high priority. I'm sure there are other priorities above crushing the windows lock-in, but this idea is at least getting attention. This will help immensely. And I really believe it is inevitable.