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China Bans Government Purchases of Windows 8
itwbennett (1594911) writes "Last week, China's Central Government Procurement Center posted a notice on new requirements for government tender, that included, among other things, the mysterious request that Windows 8 be excluded from the bidding process on computer purchases. The agency could not be reached Tuesday, but China's state-controlled Xinhua News Agency said that the government was forbidding the use of Windows 8 after Microsoft recently ended official support for Windows XP."
where china windows XP is supported but not united states XP?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They are obviously heading for open source instead of being locked in to Microsoft.
In related news, China is the strongest proponent of Windows 8.1 update.
They probably want to pirate it
seems like the rest of the entire world would ban everything that comes from the USA, or even just passed through the USA, things like routers, computers & software, TVs, Stereos, portable radios, cellphones, anything electronic, the NSA's spying methods have basically gutted any confidence & trust the rest of the world would have in the USA
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Seems like they might want to play a little bit nice with Microsoft...
Might as well use some other unsupported OS
It's Windows 8, not Windows System 7 that M$ is still selling.
...and then do absolutely nothing to stop the rampant pirating of that copy...
This just in: China was considering paying for an operating system!
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
If this is because they're upset at Microsoft for dropping XP support so quickly, then what are they going to? What OS has a longer support cycle than XP's 12.5 years?
Red Hat's is 10 years. AIX is 5-7. HP-UX is 8. Ubuntu LTS is 5 years. Mac OS is 4-ish. Solaris is likely the closest at 12 years... But its still less. Maybe they'll roll their own support?
It doesn't sound like they are actually forbidding the use of Windows 8. They are just forbidding the purchase of windows 8. I guess as long as pirated copies are used, then everything is fine?
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
....that'll learn ya.
"Windows 8 is shit, and they dont want the population to have to use shit."
Go China, save your country from the worst OS ever created!
If only other counties had that much balls, the world would be a better place (OS wise anyway).
If I were procurement I would ban it too.
With all the NSA spying going on worldwide, it's prudent for the chinese administration to steer clear of Windows 8 at the moment.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
This is not about Windows 8. This is about the MS / NSA love affair. My company has done the exact same thing. No more windows after 7. Only approved Linux variants from here on....
Honestly, I feel that many of the news services that have reported this story got the motive all wrong. I think that the Chinese government not wanting to adopt Windows 8 has much more to do with a convoluted interface and inflated licensing fee than spite over the Windows XP support debacle. Of course this is just my opinion, but from what I hear in the workplace every day in regards to Windows 8, there is a very similar narrative going on here at home.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
a Microsoft fire drill....
I love how you pretend that China is the only place where Windows is pirated. I'm pretty sure piracy of Windows is widespread in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and all of Asia.
Please help metamoderate.
Classic jumping on the NSA-hatewagon. Are the Chinese less despicable because they're obvious about it? Do they have some moral high ground because at least they're not hypocrites?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Maybe the US government should consider doing the same thing.
More likely it's just recognized that 8 is a shitty OS, that deviates too far from windows xp / windows 7, and that the next iteration of windows will wind up veering away from 8.
China likely has a huge number of government users and they don't want to pay for training them to use 8, then having to pay to retrain once 8 is dropped in favor of 9, or whatever alternative is chosen.
So having millions of machines running unpatched XP, and then telling the Americans to go fuck themselves by banned a supported OS... isn't that a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face?
I'm sure the Fifty Cent Army will find a way to justify this stupidity though.
I think they're making the right choice.
In our company all new office machines have to be Qilin (Ubuntu based Linux with some extensions), mid and top tear bosses are allowing themselves to use Windows 7, and the document handling has been switched to Debian Samba server.
I would basically say, unless there is absolutely no alternative then no non Open Source software at all. Welcome to the 21st century, Microsoft, where we have choices.
It would also appear to be "Welcome to the 21st Century, Intel, where we have choices."
This is in response to the DOJ announcement of indictments against named Chinese military / governmental officials for IP theft and espionage. The Chinese temper-tantrum is just beginning.
I wish someone had banned me from buying Win 8.
Yeah, SURPRISE! Nobody likes your crappy operating system. I certainly didn't find it surprising. How can they look at their sales numbers and find this surprising at this point?
Maybe something got lost in the translation. Something like, you know, reason.
Hitler plans to upgrade to Windows 8
Said no organization ever.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
It is stupid to use software developed by the enemy. Very unwise.
Seriously, we should be pushing for buying western, if not American, made networking, computing, etc. devices. And for the same reason that I think that China is doing the RIGHT thing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Don't yall think its high time to take back our manufacturing....all of it screw China im betting 99% of the Windows Installs in China are stolen anyways. Screw the bastards I say. we need the jobs more then them anyways.
Jack of all trades,master of none
You need to trust trust to trust in your compiler!
So long as your compiler can compile itself, and so long as you have access to other independent implementations of the same language, you can defeat the Ken Thompson attack with the David A. Wheeler defense. Just bootstrap your compiler with each of the other implementations (compile it with the other compiler, then compile it with the resulting binary), and if there's no attack, the binaries will converge. For example, if you have independent compilers A, B, and C, then C compiled with (C compiled with A) will be bit-identical to C compiled with (C compiled with B) unless an attack is in progress. Start by using Visual C++ Express, Clang, TCC, and even a C interpreter to verify your GCC.
Pretty sure most governments already decided on Windows 7 anyway when XP starting coming to a close. This seems less a reaction than just a prudent large IT procurement decision. Pretty sure if I was in charge of the decision and someone thought that adding Windows 8 into the mix was a good idea, i'd tell them to go to hell also.
Windows XP is the MSIE6 of OSes.
I see one big problem for the Chinese state.
The general population does not have the source to XP, if the government has added something to help control information the vast percentage of the general population can not see it.
With a local version of Linux you don't have just open source, you have to add local support. Even if the government tries to control the source the people who do the support can now make versions without the government add-ons.
Plus, without a lot of rework other versions of Linux (ie. not the Chinese version) will be quite usable.
This is just retaliation by the Chinese government against Microsoft for not agreeing to give them (free) Windows XP security updates forever.
That is all. Seriously.
Won't patch our already purchased/pirated WinXP copies? NOBODY USE THE NEW STUFF.
It's that simple folks.
I suspect that the Chinese government is probably concerned about the backend ties to the MS cloud. Between the visible connections and the requirement for an MS account to install & use one might suspect they wonder about what else is there in the background. Might be harder to keep secrets...
Now personally, I find Win 8.1 is almost pleasant -- although I despised 8/Win2012. But anything sensitive gets done on another platform -- I have several other flavors of Windows, Linux and Solaris in use. Besides -- their 'touch' stuff only sort of works...
Timesharing (now called 'the cloud') always made sense. But few places have good, cheap, fast internet connections available that one needs to make moving to the 'cloud' practical. Forcing people into it was not a smart move. Suggests that MS execs have lost touch with what the world looks like outside of the Redmond campus.
If you consider your biggest debtor an enemy, yes.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
You can use the other C compiler to compile old g++ and use old g++ to compile new g++.
Ever compile something twice?
If you're passing the same source files and the same flags to the same compiler and not getting the same result, then either A. your linker is leaking timestamps, or B. you've got RAM issues (as K. S. Kyosuke suggested), or C. you're compromised.
...China decides to promote internal insecurity by blocking an obvious upgrade path. Hackers around the world rejoiced and then got back to work!
My guess is that China wants to start pushing their "Red Flag Linux so that they can at least have a chance at knowing when their security is compromised.
We had a story about this some time ago - about Red Flag Software shutting down. While China may be doing just pirated XP (which should be easier to pawn) or Android, they're certainly not pushing their own flagship, which at one time was the #2 Linux distro worldwide.
Win 8 has better security than Win 7 and below. The Chinese like to spy on their citizens too much to give up the capability of projecting their will in cyber.
So China makes another massive stride ahead of the US... getting rid (eventually) of all the parasitic "Windows" malware-disguised-as-software, since ultimately they'll have to move to a new OS when M$ drops support for Vista and 7... while in America, we still suffer from a near-monopoly of M$'s design. Advantage-China! To keep up, we need to dump M$'s wretched crapware too. If we don't, we're going to continue to stagnate, or even slide down-hill.
China began their impressive hosting of the Olympic games on 08-08-08 just to illustrate how strong the sentiment.
Perhaps its just a little nauseating to the Chinese culture that they "Kentucky Fry" their national good fortune with yet another mediocre iteration of oppressive corporate software that aims to dominate the market, serve self interest at the expense of the customer, to be the remaining choice available.
Furthermore, the Chinese are pragmatic, and in light of the fact that Microsoft, quite undemocratically, willfully ignores the majority preference of XP in a "free market" it would seem a bit inconsistent of them to endorse such backward economic policy.
They're not complete fascists, after all. Just L8 bloomers.
Now that's because of Trusted Platform Module ; in order to support this DRM feature , each new windows PC has a chip on it that can override part of the OS. Now the German government thinks that this DRM features is also a Troyan horse that allows some agencies unlimited access to the PC ; now the Chinese government thinks the same. Too bad for Microsoft. Also see this article here for more info: http://news.techworld.com/secu...
I baught a Laptop (shenzhou) once with Redflag Preinstalled. As a longtime linuxuser i thought to myself "hey thats great". But after turning it on i realized imminently that RF is utter rubbish. It runs desktop as Root by default, Chinese typing doesnt work, qq doesnt work. The screen resolution refused to go beyond 800X600 it was a nightmare. I tried fixing it for days, then ragequit and installed Archlinux. That was in 2010. But i bet not much has changed.
I can understand why they dont want windows 8 but also why they dont wanna use Redflag. Both systems are cripples in their own right.