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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.'"
Dudes, Vista is a fossil already. By the time your law is passed, it'll be 'end of life'ed. Ban upgrading from XP, not upgrading to Vista. Then do the Macarena as Microsoft slips a thick stack of bills in your pocket to ensure the bill dies in committee. Like you ever had an intention of passing that law in Texas.
Is this not a bill of attainder?
Why bother upgrading to Vista at all. Just wait another two years or so until Windows 7 comes out and either upgrade machines at that time or purchase new machines which will come with Windows 7 installed.
If it would cost a lot to upgrade from XP to 7, then it's time to either switch to Linux or at least start talking about it so that Microsoft will help make the transition available for a more reasonable cost.
Considering that we're at a point where computational power is considered to be sufficient or in excess for normal, non-power users, in two years this should allow the government to purchase some low-end machines that have more than enough power to take care of the work that will probably be done on most of them.
It's not a micromanagement choice when he's responsible for a government that has perhaps 50,000 workstations, each needing a $200-300 license. Conservatively. I have no idea how many workstations the entire state educational system has, but I'd bet 50,000 is a lowball estimate. But still, that's $10 million, minimum, for an upgrade. For an educational agency's budget, that's not small potatoes. That could pay for the salaries of 57 primary school teachers for the next 5 years. The fact that the upgrade has questionable value for the educational agencies in the state is a supporting point! Why spend that much money for something with no real return on investment? Or, we could just ignore the huge economic question here and cry "evil microsoft!" or "how dare they single out a single company!" Yes... Those arguments make so much more sense than it's uneconomical.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
Why would they want Vista anyway when they could just go with Microsoft Mojave, which is a clear upgrade!
Jokes aside, I agree that this bill is stupid. Why have an I.T. department if they need the state politicians to tell them what software to use? Rather than legislate a "no-vista-upgrade" rider, they should instead devote a portion of the budget to setting up a development lab so that they can test their applications against whatever operating system they want to go with.
I had a brief three-year stint with a county government here in Northern VA and they had done just that -- they had a core group of testers test the shit out of every piece of legacy software the county used against Vista. When Vista came out, the county said "no-way" to upgrading until almost a year went by. The upgrade to Vista was definitely on their schedule, but they wanted to be sure that everything played nice together. Once their testing was done, they slowly rolled out in a beta fashion where select employees would use Vista (usually the I.T. guys within individual agencies) and then eventually upgrade everyone else.
Anyway, that was the vision of the I.T. director and NOT the county superintendent, board of directors, Virginia General Assembly, county executive or any other politician.
Best "String" Ever!
It's the legislature's job to control the budget. They have every right, and even an obligation to stop it from being wasted. Yes, this can including dictating technology. Hopefully they'll discuss this with experts before voting, but its a perfectly legit rider to put on a budget bill. In this economy I'd probably go with no upgrades period unless there's a health or safety reason for doing so.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
And it prevents "upgrade by fiat", when new hardware is ordered and automatically comes with Vista and some poor local admin has to explain to his manager that no, they should _not_ accept that unwanted upgrade and stick with a consistent, existing hardware and software version. It also prevents departments from releasing Vista-only technologies: this is important for Internet Explorer and other applications.
It also keeps the Texas paperwork pushers from playing Halo 2 or Halo 3.
We aren't upgrading to Vista either, but we aren't preventing it. More or less if a new system comes with Vista, that's fine. We have two reasons for this:
1) XP works well. We see nothing for most uses that Vista offers an improvement on. That isn't to say it's worse, just that it isn't better by enough to warrant an upgrade.
2) Vista wants more RAM. If you are buying a new system, it should have plenty of RAM for Vista and then some, RAM is cheap. Old systems may not, and may not be so easy to update. Thus a new system will likely run it well, and old system may not.
It is a technical decision on our part.
To me, this reeks of "Something I heard on the 'net," or "Something my friend told me a guy told him." Seems to me that most people who have real hate for Vista fall in to one of three categories (yes I like ordered lists):
1) People who tried it on inadequate, unsupported systems. It was slow and problematic because they lacked the power to run it, and lacked the drivers for their devices.
2) People who got second hand information on it. They never actually used Vista, they just heard from a friend or online that it was bad. They are just repeating what they heard, not relating any real experience.
3) Linux/Mac zealots that hate MS and want to sandbag Vista. They too usually haven't tried it, and are often more or less making shit up. They are just spreading FUD because they want MS to fail.
So ya, this sounds really stupid. The IT people should do a proper evaluation of Vista. Figure out what it costs to do the upgrade, including hardware (which could be nothing if the hardware is current and they have a yearly MS license as some places do), figure out the benefits, the drawbacks, and see if it is worth the time and effort. We decided it wasn't, other may decide different. Trying to legislate this is dumb. It really is an administrative task.
"If any agency already has a contract their law means [nothing]."
You are saying that if there is a contract with a company, and the company delivers a poor product, the government can do nothing? Don't forget that Microsoft top managers deliberately and knowingly delivered an unfinished product, as court records have shown. The costs of dealing with the hassles of Vista are far greater than the price of Vista. (And Microsoft has done that before: Windows ME and DOS 4.0 are just two examples.)
The following quote may need translation for those who are unfamiliar with habitual abuse:
"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.' "
Translation:
"We're a corporation. Corporations should be allowed to be as abusive as they want, without comment from you political peons who are far below us in power and hierarchy."
It would have, if 7 supported upgrading from directly XP. Unfortunately, so far, it does not, though we'll have to see if that is still the case for the release.
Jokes aside, I agree that this bill is stupid. Why have an I.T. department if they need the state politicians to tell them what software to use?
Because ultimately it's not the IT department's job to decide which policy should be followed: no matter what organisation is involved, their only part in policy-making is to provide their expertise to the people in charge of deciding (in this case, elected representatives - in the case of a company it would be appointed managers).
By the way, how do you know if it isn't precisely the IT department's advice that made Texas Senate decide for this policy? Something like "This OS is too unstable, we advise avoiding to upgrade to it for now unless there are imperative reasons to do so."
There's nothing like $HOME
If the Senate are responsible for setting a tight budget, and don't want to be hit by a load of agencies complaining that their costs overran because they had to upgrade lots of machines, then this seems like a reasonable action. They're saying, look, you don't need the latest whizzy version of the OS for boring government work, and if you really feel that your department needs Vista, and you want us to pay for it, put through an application and it can be considered.
But otherwise, you're probably wasting part of your your IT training and hardware budget on retooling for an OS that looks like it's liable to be replaced in a year or so's time anyway.
Eric Baird
They don't pass laws saying "you can't buy this companies' asphalt" or "you can't upgrade your microscopes to this particular one" either. Their lack of expertise means that they shouldn't be making technical decisions that require expertise.
Saying "we need a road from A to B" or "stem cell research can/can't be funded" doesn't require expertise.
So in order to guarantee continuity of supply of XP, it's probably helpful to have a policy that allows agency buyers to respond to MS reps by saying, I'm sorry, we want to buy XP, and its XP or nothing ... so stop fucking us around and sell us the damned operating system that we've already standardised on and want to keep using. Or sod off.
This isn't singling out Microsoft. Singling out Microsoft would be, if they still refuse to play ball, classifying them as an "unsafe supplier" and ruling that all government departments whose systems are considered mission-critical should move all future development and IT work to open-source software for security reasons, since the current manufacturer clearly can't be trusted with continuity of supply. If US government projects and infrastructure is being threatened by a supplier's refusal to supply the proprietary systems that are needed to keep things running, then that becomes a potential Homeland Security issue.
Protection of key government systems and infrastructure, an' all that.
Eric Baird