Microsoft Vista, IE7 Banned By U.S. DOT

An anonymous reader writes "According to a memo being reported on by Information week, the US Department of Transportation has issued a moratorium on upgrading Microsoft products. Concerns over costs and compatability issues has lead the federal agency to prevent upgrades from XP to Vista, as well as to stop users from moving to IE 7 and Office 2007. As the article says, 'In a memo to his staff, DOT chief information officer Daniel Mintz says he has placed "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades as "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade."'"

Comments

Nothing really unusual about it

[2.7182]

This is an agency that is very conservative. I mean, it's illegal to have curved driver side mirrors in the US for pete's sake.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

Where I work we just switched to XP from Windows 2000 less than 2 years ago. We won't switch to Vista anytime in the near future (my guess is three years at least). This isn't a story, it's standard practice. In order to upgrade, you need to do a lot of testing and updating software, especially in-house apps. If they were using Linux, they wouldn't update the kernel as soon as it was available either.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[bcattwoo]

This is how I have heard you should adjust your mirrors. While sitting in your usual position lean your head to the left until it is almost against the window. Adjust your mirror until you can just see the back corner of your car. As a car passes you while driving, it should become visible in your sideview mirror just as it leaves your rearview and be visible out of the corner of your eye as it leaves your sideview. Seated comfortably with the seat all the way back I have to crank my mirrors all the way out to the maximum but it works.

If you want to see where your car is when backing up, just turn around and look. The back corner of your car isn't going anywhere.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[aedan]

European Volvo mirrors have a faint vertical dotted line about 2 cm from the outside edge. To the outside of this line the mirror is convex and gives you a better view of the blind spot.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Anonymous Coward]

I know!

Actually, I wasn't taught to look, and even though I had heard about cars having a blind spot, I didn't worry about it. Then one day a couple of weeks after I got my license I was slowly changing lanes and this guy started honking so I wouldn't hit him. I got a good scare out of it, and learned to turn my head.

It's good advice, and people should be taught to do it. Most people just don't care, and don't even bother to signal.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[UncleMidriff]

I work as a contractor for the FAA, which is under the DOT, and around here, Windows XP is a brand new thing. We just switched from Windows 2000 less than a year ago, for the reasons you stated.

I have no doubt that the FAA will switch to Vista a some point, but it will likely be around the time the next version of Windows comes out. I'm not holding out much hope for a switch to Linux then, either, as most of our in-house apps are .NET, VB 6, or even Access(!).

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't count the number of times that I've almost side-swiped someone driving in my blind spot.

You are a fucking idiot. Move your head a little bit and actually check for a car. If someone's trying to pass you, they will inevitably be in your 'blind' spot at some point. Next time pay attention before you kill us all.

Fixed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to any Microsoft software products."

Re:Seriously, so what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the military has decided that there is no IE7 or Vista till at least August 07, and even then, it isn't a guaranteed that they'll decide to go ahead and allow it.

Re:avoid early adoption in production systems

[allscan]

Speaking of which, one of the main web applications I work on, for the US Gov't might I add, is still using Coldfusion 5. Talk about behind the times. We are only now upgrading to MX7.

Don't worry, he's being fair.

[twitter]

I wish they would at least move to IE7 if they are not going to move to Firefox/Mozilla. To stay with IE6 is just unfair.

From the fine article:

Among the options the Transportation Department is weighing as a possible alternative or complement to Windows Vista are Novell's Suse Linux and, for a limited group of users, Apple's Macintosh hardware and software, he says.

With an open mind like that, I'd be surprised if they were not running some kind of Netscape browser already. Give him some time and he's discover Firefox, Debian, Open Office and all sorts of great stuff.

Re:Why it's news

[davper]

The fact that a government agency is not upgrading to Vista is not going to hurt MS Revenue. MS offers a yearly enterprise licensing system at a fixed cost per user.

This is the licensing that my company of 10,000 uses. I can upgrade a Win2K machine to XP for no additional cost. The same goes for any other MS App.

I am sure many companies are just like mine. They usually wait a year or 2 before upgrading to wait for all the bug fixes. I guarantee you my company won't even think about Vista or MSO2007 until 2009.

Re:Seriously, so what?

[Dragonslicer]

You see, upgrading a Microsoft OS is much like making love to beautiful woman...

Except that there are plenty of people on Slashdot that have experience upgrading a Microsoft OS.

Re:As a webmaster

[kennygraham]

Currently, they've bowed to pressure from WHATWG (a group formed by incumbent minor browser vendors) to require future upgrades to all be backwards compatible, including specifying rules for parsing broken web pages and requiring all future standards to support them.

Since when is XHTML2 going to be backwards compatible? From W3C:

such strict element-wise backwards compatibility is no longer necessary ... Much of XHTML 2 works already in existing browsers; much, but not all: just as when forms and tables were added to HTML, and people had to wait for new version of browsers before being able to use the new facilities, some parts of XHTML 2, principally XForms and XML Events, still require user agents that understand that functionality.

And sure they're specifying a rule for parsing broken web pages... they're specifying that they shouldn't be parsed at all.

Orgs banning IE7 because of SAP Portal

[Synic]

SAP Portal software doesn't work with IE7 without using a recent patch and huge orgs can't patch SAP without a shitstorm of trouble, so they just ban IE7 altogether. Oddly enough Firefox works with those versions of SAP Portal (although suffering from some minor rendering bugs causing very wide pages with scrollbars).

Re:As a U.S. taxpayer ...

[Phillup]

I say "thank you" to the DOT. It's not often we catch a break.

What are you talking about? There are breaks everywhere. You can use EXCLAMATION POINTs and QUESTION MARKs to mark a break. For shorter breaks, there are COMMAs. DOTs are not the only way to catch a break. Dude... this is the web.

Try <br> instead.

;-)

Re:Other Policies

[Phillup]

Your local chamber of commerce is a lot different than a major US agency like DOT, DOE, etc. Most large organizations, including government, restrict what users can install in order to minimize support requirements. Maybe that is why they installed Linux... it is a great way to keep people from installing the game they bought at Office Depot.