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

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[n2art2]

If your right then I guess all these cars are illegal.

http://autoquarterly.com/media/ssr_lg.jpgChevy SSR
http://www.ptcruizer.com/ptpix/2006-pt-cruiser.jpg PT Cruiser
And others.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[allscan]

The original poster is talking about the mirror(glass) itself, not the housing. Curved glass and mirrors change the shapes and point of view of objects when they reflect. So, things may look out of place when looking into the mirror.

Re:Nothing really unusual about it

[n2art2]

That makes more sense, because the glass itself also has curved edges. . . so what he/she ment to say is that convex mirrors are illegal as the main mirror (cause there are add-ons and such for trucks) on the driver's side.

Re:Why not change the site to Slash-Microsoft?

[dedazo]

Here's how it works. Slashdot owes its continued existence to Microsoft. Without Microsoft, Slashdot would be another obscure blog. But over the years the people who run Slashdot have figured out what brings the big bucks in ad revenue: Microsoft bashing.

Now, everybody loves to bash Microsoft. It's the "in" thing to do. Never mind that half that bashing is hyperbolic FUD that the rest of the world (you know, normal people) look at and go "huh?" But Slashdot has turned that into a smooth-running cash flow.

Just go back through their "search" function and find all the Microsoft stories. I'd be comfortable saying that probably 3/5ths of them are either worded in a way that fans the flames, are stupid exagerations, have disingenuous titles that end with a strategic question mark (much like all those Fox News "stories" on neocon pet hate topics) or are just plain FUD. The key here is that most people who read Slashdot never actually read the comments, where occasionally you'll see someone saying that the article in question is stupidity encarnate. No, a million eyeballs already saw the "Bill Gates Kills Kittens?" headline and added it to their "let me tell you why M$ sux" repertoire.

In many ways Slashdot's "coverage" of Microsoft is a bit like Al-Jazeera's "coverage" of the United States and Israel. They also have a captive audience that want and need the targets of their hatred to be evil, so they believe everything the "news" tells them. Except that Slashdot is even better, because the "editors" can simply shrug and say "hey, we just post stuff that other people submit". They've driven off most of the intelligent people who used to discuss interesting things related to free software and technology and now simply feed the vicious (but profitable) circle that exists between them and the "OMFG M$ SUXX LINUX ROXXORZ LOLOL" crowd.

The overwhelming irony of Slashdot is that it is owned by a commercial concern that competes with Microsoft in many ways, has proven itself untrustworthy by closing off the source code for their flagship product and actively promotes products that "simplify" offsourcing. Talk about pet topics? Every time Slashdot posts a story about how evil Microsoft is, about how great open source is (or how terrible it is for open source to be attacked or subverted) or about how damaging offsourcing is, they are in direct contradiction to the corporation that owns them, or are effectively promoting them.

BTW, I'm not claiming no one should criticize Microsoft, or that they are above any such criticism. They do a lot of stupid and wrong things, chief among them being annoyingly toxic to their own customers (in my opinion). There's a difference though between informing your constituence of facts and strategically picking the most inflammatory submissions that cover every story about MS to whip them up into a frenzy in the name of ad impressions - never mind padding them with infantile "editorial" comments.

And don't even get me started on the pseudoscience crap. But there goes my karma anyway.