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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."'"
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.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
What this is really saying is that IT in the DOT wants all their systems to be running the same set of software. Wouldn't this just make sense from an efficiency point of view? I mean, they probably have bans on running MacOS 7.1, Gentoo and OS2 4.0 as well so I don't get the big news.
Did anyone seriously think large enterprise level customers would be jumping to Vista immediately, or even worse, letting their employees arbitrarily upgrade their own machines?
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I'm sure some are wondering why this is news. The US government is Microsoft's biggest customer, by far. If many agencies cut back on Microsoft purchases it will hurt Microsoft a lot. I would imagine one department's decision may set a precedent for others. And even if not, many investors watch for government spending news when deciding Microsoft's stock value. So any change in government policy can have huge implications for Microsoft.
Developers: We can use your help.
I think you'll also find a policy that says you can't install Linux on your desktop either.
If you allow people to randomly upgrade their departments without considering the interactivity implications, you could inadvertently cause a major problem in a large government organization.
IMHO, it's a sound decision, and isn't a slap to microsoft at all. Everyone has to evaluate their own situation and upgrade if they feel it benefits them. Hell, having a win98 box (non-networked) and running a robot safely for the past 8 years is certainly safer than upgrading it. TFA was clearly biased, and made some idiotic remarks like "ZOMG, if the government doesn't buy vista, MS will go broke!" as if the millions of XP licenses are suddenly free.
So, hold all the "haha" tags, because a thorough evaluation of major upgrades on critical infrastructure makes some sense.
In general, businesses shouldn't be "early adopters" of any technology unless there's a compelling business reason. Any "early adoption" should be in testbed or non-critical environments.
I wish I could say "never upgrade without a compelling reason" but time marches on and lack of new software and the approaching end of vendor support can be very good reasons to stop using a product.
With that in mind, don't even consider using a Windows-based system unless it's been around 6 months UNLESS there is a very good reason, and strongly consider moving away from it at least 6 months before end-of-life.
Machines which are in special-purpose environments, such as machines which are not connected to any network, or which are adequately firewalled and whose connections with non-firewalled machines are heavily restricted, can continue to be used after end-of-life, but even these should be migrated to a vendor-supported environment or at least one where you have source code so you can fix problems yourself.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Since he's clearly bent on saving taxpayer dollars by not climbing on the MSFT "rising license costs" escalator, the words he's going to be hearing soon are:
"Have you ever thought about what you'll do after government service?"
This is a non-story. It is perfectly normal for any organization to not adopt a new OS for a significant amount of time after it is released, years, even. There are enough things to harp on Vista without making things up and pretending they have significance...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
It is very ordinary for a company (or government agency) to adopt a "wait and see" attitude toward new software. Most companies I've worked for will not install a new OS, new software, new firmware, new drivers or whatever until they've gone through at least one revision.
Recently because of Microsofts crappy handling of IE7 upgrades (flagging them as "critical updates"), we had a number of remote users on IE7 and our SSL VPN appliances simply would not work. I had to call a moritorium on upgrading to IE7 and deployed the Microsoft "prevent IE7 update" patch in order to stop these critical updates.
Then, I had to use early-release code for our Juniper VPN concentrator, which broke about half a dozen other things.... Finally, after a few weeks, new a firmware revision for the Juniper VPN came out which enabled me to get the box back to a stable state AND allow IE7 to be used.
But if we had simply called a "ban" on IE7 upgrades in the first place, it would have saved me a lot of headache and our company a lot of productivity.
This is not a "Microsoft sux" decision, but merely a business-case against early-release software that they would likely take whether it was Microsoft or Juniper or Cisco or Oracle or whatever...
Now, Microsoft's handling of the IE7 "critical update" bullcrap.... that falls clearly in the arena of "Microsoft sux".
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
WTF?
Thousands of companies have banned upgrades when new products come out that might break internal apps or include the need (and expense) of training users.
Why is this news?
When I see the headline: "NSA embrases Active X as a security standard, THEN it might have some news value. All these Bash-Microsoft threads only serve to remove cred from this forum, unless they contain some REAL NEWS or INFORMATION.
Bitches!
I think his point is that drivers side mirrors have a blind spot, which causes who knows how many accidents, but its illegal for manufacturers to make the mirrors in a different way, which is why K-Mart sells those little $2 stick-on convex mirrors. Seems like a lot more engineering time is spent on things like heated/cooled beverage holders than would be needed to design a better side mirror, I don't know the law but I'd assume thats why manufacturers haven't improved them. Of course, if somebody (the manufacturers) lobbied hard enough for it, I'm sure the DOT would change their mind.
I've heard of people saying "But I don't want version 5! I want you guys to make version 3 work the way it's supposed to!"
I really think a lot of nontechnical users couldn't care less about new features or redesigned interfaces -- what they've got works, and they don't want it messed with. So every time a software company adds a bunch of features or redesigns the interface, there's a good number of the user base that is going to be seriously ticked off because they have to retrain on all the new stuff.
Microsoft is one company that doesn't even come close to getting that. I've seen some of their smart house ideas for example -- their designs solve problems that people don't have to begin with. (Is anyone really in such a state that having the fridge track the RFID chips in your food packaging will improve things? Well, handicapped people and shut-ins, maybe, but for the vast majority of people it's overkill at best.)
And you can make a business case for that. Face it -- you develop for your company based (hopefully) on a set of standards for what the company will use as its backbone technology. I worked at a Fortune 500 once, and they held on to Netscape 4.7 for the longest time, because it was deployed everywhere (globally), and everything was designed to work for it. It wasn't the greatest browser, but it was still better than IE5 at some critical things.
Change comes slowly at big companies/organizations, because it's due to economies of scale. The more machines you have to upgrade, the more applications you have to re-write to support the upgrades, the more the bottom line takes a pounding. Even if you manage to pull off a major, world-wide upgrade, you're going to spend the next couple of years fending off bugs that will turn up every day. Eventually you will get it stable -- just in time for the "next big thing".
Companies cannot afford to go chasing every new technology or upgrade that comes along, without risking the stability that IT works so hard to create.
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"It was like the sound of thousands of MSFT reps all calling their elected representatives at once."
You misspelled "sending a campaign check to" and "sponsored."
"..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."
The DOT is just figuring this out now? Hell, most of us knew this years ago.
Most of the stuff on
Greetings from technical support.
Customer: "I cannot access internet/my bank/whatever"
Me: "Did you install IE7 recently?"
"Yup"
"Okay, use system restore. Here's a complimentary link to firefox."
They do not call again.
You forgot a few steps...
Anyone's system breaks beyond economical repair. Must buy a new system. New system comes with Vista installed. Boss gets new system, subordinate gets bosses old system, because IT guy works for boss. Now boss sends out letter or email that has M$ new "enhanced" format of HTML or doc, and everyone has to upgrade.
yes, certainly don't want to underestimate the idiots. However, I can't count how many times somebody has almost side-swiped me w/o checking their blind spot, or how many times I've had to hit my brakes a little harder b/c of something in front of me than if I did not glance to check my blind spot. Maybe they could just dedicate a 1-2" x 1-2" of your mirror (the bottom rightmost part that is usually just showing you a reflection of your door) to your blind spot, it would be small enough to keep people from using it to gauge anything other than that something other than the road is in their blind spot.
Funny how the positives from the articles aren't mentioned.
I also like the use of the word "ban", which doesn't appear anywhere in the memo. No negative implications with that word.
If you are going to bash someone, at least be a bit more subtle.
I've never understood why companies base so many important applications off stuff like MS Office, or IE, or other apps that they don't have any control over. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to design applications in an environment that isn't as likely to stop working? I hear this complaint all the time. We can't change to OO.o, because we have a critical business app written in Excel. Why do companies continually use office suites and specific web browsers as development platforms? This never ends up being a good idea. I can understand web apps, but there should never be a reason to make the require something in IE or NS or any other browser. Just code them to work with standard HTML/CSS/JS and you won't have all these upgrade problems.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
people by and large have been writing, spreadsheeting, and making tedious powerpoint presentations with older versions of office just fine and dandy. Since 99.5% of what needs to be done can be done without spending more money, why bother to upgrade?
But... what if I'm backing up close to something that's near the driver's side (or passenger side) of my car? Or it's below the level of the door panels and such? Mirrors are pretty much the only way to see those obstacles reliably, and judge your distance from them.
Maybe the idiot moniker was misplaced, and should have been self-attributed?
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Don't most people actually turn their heads to LOOK before changing lanes?
That's the way I was taught to drive.....
I keep a constant eye on the mirrors while driving to have a good feeling where traffic is around me, but, I always turn to look before changing lanes...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I can list the Enterprise applications that do not work, in any capacity, under IE7.
They work under IE6, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Konqueror, but not under IE7.
Juniper SA is one example. Some older versions of PeopleSoft act kind of funky. Some of the online CRM stuff doesn't behave properly.... there are others... not to mention all the internal software.
Blah.
Also, don't discount the fact that the average business-cost of a man-hour of employee time is about $30/hr and assuming a liberal 1 hour to coordinate with the user, access their machine and do a complete install and config (including staff overhead), the cost of deploying it to 60,000 users is a hair under $2 million in IT costs and $2 million in productivity loss during the upgrade process.
And then the question is "why did we just spend $4 million"? What did it get us?
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
...you do realize that the entire reason they're doing this is to KEEP a monoculture, right? Because a monoculture is easy to admin. Having 15 different OS, while likely good from a security standpoint, is never going to be a viable option for any business (or government). Just look at Linux - its extreme diversity and customizability has always been its greatest strength and greatest weakness; I can almost guarantee you that the only way Linux will ever have a hope of stealing the crown from Windows will be to have a single distribution so consolidate market share that it's a monoculture of its own.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Sigh. The question IN FULL is why they are using an office suite as a software development environment and application platform. 99% of the applications "written" in excel would have been far better developed as a standalone application and excel offers no functionality whatsoever over roviding the same functionality in a web app.
Because when you use a system that is not an application environment as if it were one, hidden costs rear their heads. Your application won't work in newer or older versions of the software, for example.
You're assuming that it is cheaper to do business this way, and in the short term that's correct - and that's okay if you don't plan to survive beyond the short term. If you want to actually be around for the long haul, you have to be farsighted, not exceptionally shortsighted.
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Bullish Machine Tzar
Oh, for Christ's sake, you're not turning around and staring over your shoulder, you're doing a quick eye flick to determine whether the space is occupied by A) air, or B) something large, metal, and opaque that may do significant body damage if you run into it. If this takes you longer than a fraction of a second, you're doing it wrong.
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
Ok, I look over my right shoulder... how do I figure out how close I am to the 1' high curb(maybe you spell it kerb?) on my left hand side? Stick my head out the window over my left shoulder? Or just use my mirror, and still be able to see cars beside me when I'm driving because I have it set to as wide an angle as possible while still keeping the very edge of my car in view?
I may be an asshole, but I've never caused an accident in well over 10 years of driving, and I've stopped a couple chain-reactions from people rear-ending me while I was stopped from going any further because I stopped back far enough. I also quite often drive larger vehicles where the ONLY way to look behind you is through the side mirrors (ever think of that, retard?), and trailers, which are a little bit of a trick to back up and pretty much REQUIRE you to use the mirrors in many cases.
In short, go fuck yourself, and have a nice day!
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
OS X server licensing not as heinous as MS?
Are you on crack? They're not in the same neighborhood, much less ball park.
All Xserves come with unlimited client licenses. And the OS X Server software comes in two flavors, unlimited clients ($1k) and 10 clients ($500). The 10 client limitation ONLY applies to AFP connections. Everything else - mail, web, smb, ftp - is sill unlimited.
Try putting 500 users on an Exchange server. Try putting 500 users on OS X Server. Spend the extra money on an all expenses paid conference trip to Vegas for two weeks.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Licensing isn't even in the same planet compared to MS.
unlimited license of server is $1000. it COMES with the xserve.
Maintenance (3 years of free upgrades, for 10.5-6, etc.) is another $1000, and entirely worth it.
So initial license purchase on top of the hardware is $1000 if you want 3 years of major versions of os x server. From past experience, that saves you $1000, because 2 more updates will happen in the next 3 years.
You are looking at $4,000 from apple vs $4313 from dell, but the dell only comes with 5 CALs (bare minimum 1u dual dual core xenon servers).
Most companies waited a long time before upgrading to XP if they even did that--I still know some major companies using 2000. But the real question is why does ANYONE need to upgrade? Most offices need office applications, email and a web browser. A few people need other, more specialized programs. But if you've got one of the later versions of Office and Windows XP, WHY should you upgrade? And it's not like your users will appreciate having the latest and greatest--they just got used to the last version and you're going to hear a lot of complaints over items moved or changed. What REALLY is office 2007 going to do--make my coffee? Any new release from MS is going to be full of bugs and security holes--why deal with the hassle?
That's why Microsoft wants to move to a lease-type role model where you rent the software rather than own it--because there's no compelling need to change and eventually they will stop upgrading. Or, worse for MS, they'll move to other applications like Open Office.
Our office is certainly not going to Vista and not even IE7. We use Oracle portal for the web and testing found some issues using IE7 with it. I've also helped a friend with her website and commercial CDs. Security setting are almost backwards. We found IE7 will have some basic securities locked up so tight (like running a CD from the drive) that it's hard to find where to turn them off. More important things, like phishing security that should be left on and probably won't interfere, can easily be turned off by a menu, however.
While I currently have IE7 for testing, I personally use FireFox exclusively for everything else, it has everything I could want and then some.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!