US Army Will Upgrade To Windows Vista

MojoKid writes "While many organizations are preparing for an upgrade to Windows 7, the US Army is upgrading to Windows Vista. The upgrade will include getting rid of all the Office 2003 programs and installing Office 2007 in its place, and is scheduled for a Dec. 31 completion date. Half the Army's computers (they have 744,000 desktop units) have Office 2007 so far, and 13 percent are on Vista, which was released in January 2007. Windows 7 is supposed to launch before year's end, so the Army will be fully on Vista sometime after Microsoft's next-generation OS is already launched."

Comments

I like vista

[alienunknown]

There, I said it. And I'm probably going to lose karma for this post as everyone seems to hate vista here but oh well.

I know there are going to be dozens (if not hundreds) of vista jokes about this article but I still don't know why everyone hates vista so much.

This is going to sound really weird, and I am not making this up. I'm a Linux user (kubuntu at the moment, used to use slackware and I'm thinking of installing fedora) and I have an old mac that I use regularly too. I wasn't too fond of XP, and I'm not a huge fan of microsoft either because of their dirty business tactics. I got Vista (with sp1) cheap because I'm a uni student. The first thing I did before buying Vista was to make sure that all the parts I had were compatible, and luckily they were as I only just built the computer. Anyway, so I installed vista expecting there to be a million problems, I had a preconceived negative opinion of vista and I was actually quite surprised. Its stable, fast (on my computer, at least) and I'm quite enjoying using it.

However, I never used Vista before SP1 and I didn't have the driver problems. And I guess because I don't use XP that I wasn't missing any of XP's features.

Anyway, I guess my experience isn't the usual experience. Sure, I'm not going to make Vista my main machine (I love kubuntu and os x too much to do that :)) but I don't regret installing Vista.

Taxpayers money being well spent

[jocknerd]

I should know. I work for a city government and we are getting ready to bring in Sharepoint. No business plan, no requirements documents like are needed for the small web apps I write. We're bringing Sharepoint in because the CIO is a sheep just like 95% of the other CIO's out there. If they see others doing it, they're going to follow suit. Meanwhile, due to budget constraints, our libraries will be open fewer hours. Yep, we've got our priorities in order.

Re:US Army Will Upgrade To Windows Vista

[NoobixCube]

The NT kernel has many great features that put it on a par with Unix in terms of security and functionality. As yet, no operating system using the NT kernel has actually used those features. Even UAC is a bizarre hack of a permissive userland, and doesn't use the kernel's security features. It's about as secure as Windows 98, thanks to Microsoft's butchery of the userland in the name of backwards compatibility.

Re:Military QA

[NoobixCube]

I'd like to preface this comment by saying I don't mean to be snarky, but given the general tone of it people are bound to misinterpret. This is Slashdot, afterall...

How much does the QA cost in terms of money and man-hours? How much is Microsoft billing the US government for 744,000 copies of Vista and Office? It just seems to me that no matter how big of a "discount" Microsoft is giving, you can't beat free. Linux is proven to be secure and stable, even without military QA. I'm sure it would still be put through it, and rightly so, but it would take much less work to get any gaps in Linux sealed up tighter than Windows ever could be.