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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.'"
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.
Well no, in reality they should take out the Vista-specific wording and leave it as a generic, all-purpose "No buying thousands of licenses of anything without approval" rule.
In this specific case, the gist of the message is "If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it". He has identified XP as a working product that suits the needs of the government, and does not want to see asshats blowing a fortune on Vista and associated support costs, when the benefit is nil. He's basically saying the same thing millions of I.T. people have said since Vista's release.
-Billco, Fnarg.com