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Texas Senate Proposes a Budget With a No-Vista-Upgrades Rider
CWmike writes "The Texas state Senate yesterday gave preliminary approval to a state budget that includes a provision forbidding government agencies from upgrading to Windows Vista without written consent of the legislature. Sen. Juan Hinojosa, vice chairman of the Finance Committee, proposed the rider because 'of the many reports of problems with Vista ... We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Microsoft, but the problems with this particular [operating] system are known nationwide,' Hinojosa said during a Senate session debating the rider (starting at 4:42 of this RealMedia video stream). 'And the XP operating system is working very well.' A Microsoft spokeswoman said in response, 'We're surprised that the Texas Senate Finance Committee adopted a rider which, in effect, singles out a specific corporation and product for unequal treatment. We hope as the budget continues to go through the process, this language will be removed.'"
I'm sure Microsoft can pay to have that done.
With Windows 7 just around the corner, it makes far more sense to wait for the first service pack of Windows 7, then to upgrade XP to a soon to be replaced OS.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
As much as I'm unimpressed by Vista(and dread the eventual move of the PC side of the operation I work for) and amused by this bill, it is a stupid idea.
It is perfectly acceptable, indeed kind of the whole point, for legislatures to make laws, and handle budget matters, and this would give them the legal authority to do something like this; but that doesn't make micromanagement a good practice. If Texas' state IT minions are so incompetent that they need politicians to tell them what software to use, based on anecdotal evidence, then they should be fired at once. If not, then they should be treated like reasonably responsible adults, and allowed to do their jobs to the best of their expertise.
Broad requirements like "thou shalt use only open, interoperable systems" are perfectly appropriate; but "thou shalt not use item X" is just stupid, even if I happen to dislike item X.
Several/many Federal agencies already have done this as a agency-wide policy, i.e. "XP is fine, we're not officially approving or allowing Vista purchases". (Though I approve in general I'd prefer if it was left to IT in agencies to make the choice, not legislative mandate).
Looks good so far, reasonable, tech savvy-- he just wants to ensure everyone uses stable, functioning software, and---
*facepalm*
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Umm. Only if "producing a product that some customers believe isn't worth buying" is now a crime...
As I said in another comment, I think that this is a bad piece of law. However, the legislature has the legal authority to write up the budget, that is, and historically has been, one of the most important legislative powers. "Don't buy X without special permission" is a perfectly licit thing to put in a budget.
If they were trying to make the sale of Vista illegal in Texas, you'd have a stronger case, though probably not strong enough; but exercising budgetary control to not buy something is totally licit.
So, does this person actually know anything about operating systems? Or is this "my friend heard from a friend heard from that friendly Mac guy" type of silliness?
I mean, where I work we're not upgrading to Vista either. But that was a decision made by IT, after actually looking into it. I highly doubt the politicians have any idea of what they're talking about.
Remember, next month they could just as easily say "no upgrading to Linux, everyone knows that's socialism!" It'd have just as much research behind it as this legislation does.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Yeah, plus how hard/expensive will it be to get a new PC with XP instead of Vista?
It is like a friend of mine that compared prison to hotels because they both have color TVs.
Yeah, just the same.
Plus, I don't what my state officials having to go out to find B&W TVs.
You know how hard those would be to find now-a-days?
That is a lot of flea markets the prison system employees would have to attend.
What they tell their constituents is different from real life. Neo-cons, like Tom Delay was, LOVE to be paid to change their opinion. In fact, I would not be surprised if large amounts of funds show up in Texan pols re-elect funds, with the disappearance of that language.
No, No,
The anti-virus and security upgrade treadmill is a farce, as long as Active-X and extension based execution are pervasive Win X has no security, if the Security Policy is modernised then there is massive application level incompatibility, the only way to run Win-x securely is to virtualize it under Linux.
If you have 50,000 staff using XP, who've been trained on XP, and you want to migrate them to Vista, you'll have to budget retraining them to use the new tools you're issuing them with. Are you going to send 50,000 people on a "Moving to Vista" training course?
Eric Baird
He has absolutely no technical expertise to make that decision. It should be left to a dedicated group of IT staff well versed in security.
This is like refusing to replace a car's transmission that's in serious danger of blowing up, simply because no one knows how to repair the new models.
I'm no fan of Vista, but XP only gives the appearance of reliability because it's had 10 years for people to work around its quirks and box it in. Its security problems outweigh any ease of use considerations.
So XP is about to blow up? Really? And Vista is the solution to that? What if the transmission's just fine, but the dealership is sending you postcards saying "hey, your transmission is 10 years old now, and even though we know it's been maintained, and we don't really suspect that it's about to break, we think you should buy this expensive new one we came up with that does more stuff and we think is super cool"... should you replace it? There isn't a single right answer to that question, and it's going to depend a lot on how you use the car and what kind financial situation you are in. Since the Texas State Government probably doesn't need the spiffy new features of Vista, and it most likely doesn't really provide any mission critical upgrades (maybe once it too has had years of security updates to lock it down it will, but for now the security advantages are speculative at best), spending a ton of money to upgrade from what they already have working amounts to little more than spending a bunch of money to start over from scratch.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
The software cost of upgrading is often effectively nil, because most large enterprise environments are on multi-year Enterprise Agreement contracts that allow for no-additional-cost software upgrades...
Like they haven't been already burned before by that company, at least once, by similar claims.
Deciding that a specific product is inappropriate is out of their purview...
Except if that product is known bad. They have an obligation to prevent further damage and / or to prevent good money from being thrown after bad. The recession is a depression in many areas, as evidenced by among other things, deflation. Regardless of recession or depression the times are harder, and not through getting harder, than has been experience for a few generations. And with that in mind, any wasted money means lost jobs. That wasted money can come through unnecessary licensing as well as lost efficiency.
If the French Gendarmerie can reduce IT costs by 70% through use of FOSS, why isn't Texas allowed to do so as well? Or, as the original post states, why not at least be able to avoid shelling out for MS Vista upgrades and upgrade headaches?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.