particularly liberal. After spending 8 years on the UCB campus and living in many college towns, I can tell you that UCB itself is relatively conservative. The town of Berkeley is liberal and, at times, Berkeley students may be relatively liberal, but the university is not.
There have been some other interesting discoveries regarding horizontal gene transfer recently. For example, this PNAS paper looks at sea slugs that can photosynthesize by themselves -- http://www.pnas.org/content/105/46/17867.full.pdf). The sea slugs photosynthesize through a combination of harvesting chloroplasts from the algae they eat and via horizontal transfer of genes involved in photosynthesis from these same algae. This is a bizarre and amazing discovery which demonstrates how genes can move from plants and be incorporated in an animal genome.
I've never known a state department to maintain a diversity of Windows and Office versions, either. They tend to transition a whole department at a time.
Our department (~2,000 employees) updates Office and Windows versions as new machines are bought or if people specifically ask for an upgrade (most users don't have a clue which version they have and do not ask). My old department was the same (500 employees). Even if your department upgraded machines en masse, you still have problems when you collaborate with people from other institutions.
A friend just bought a new laptop with Vista. He can't open his old MS Office documents -- "Office 2007 does not support documents from XYZ version of Word/Excel/etc.," or something to that effect. Clever!
The only problem with this argument is that it simply asserts assumptions without any support. Having worked in a couple of California state departments and seen how many others work, I can safely say that the vast majority of state workers use three applications -- word processing, email, and web browsing. A small percentage use spreadsheets but typically for light-duty tasks. None of these applications gain an advantage on Windows. Indeed, I have used Mac OS X & Linux machines for the last 12 years, collaborating with my Windows colleagues, and done just fine without a Windows box. Windows people have as many problems with incompatibilities between various Office & Windows versions than I do sharing from a different OS. Also, it seems reasonable to assume that state workers do similar jobs regardless of which state they work for.
Finally, I've worked at a couple of universities and they seem to do quite well with a diversity of computing systems.
States that find that their needs have viable alternatives (whether they always choose Microsoft or not) are unlikely to see Microsoft as even being a monopolist, much less a harmful one. It would be more fairly described as "ironic" if states accused Microsoft of being a harmful monopoly and sought redress but did not use Microsoft software...
Only problem with this argument is that California is not particularly different from other states in terms of software needs and the vast majority of state workers could accomplish their tasks on a Linux or Mac OS X platform. Perhaps the real reason for the continued pressure is that it provides leverage when it comes to negotiating Microsoft site licenses?
Perhaps it's only a little ironic that some states
keep fighting the Microsoft Monopoly yet force their
own (state) employees to use Microsoft products. This
is true of California (and probably most states).
How much do they really care to bust the monopoly if
they can't even wean themselves from the convicted
monopolist?
How much could California really care about a Microsoft monopoly if they force all state employees to use Windows? So much for the theory about the state going after MS because Apple's headquarters are in Cupertino.
I don't know about other states, but California's state agencies make it essentially impossible for state workers to purchase a computer without Windows. It seems a bit ironic that the state is hassling Microsoft about being a monopoly yet making damn sure that MS maintains a monopoly for state government uses. Perhaps this is just a way for the state to get lower prices for MS products?
Awhile back, we just disallowed the use of Windows across the entire enterprise and now we worry a lot less about our users getting into trouble. Sometimes it's good to examine the assumptions...
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AV is a lose-lose situation for MS -- they're screwed if they do and screwed if they don't...
particularly liberal. After spending 8 years on the UCB campus and living in many college towns, I can tell you that UCB itself is relatively conservative. The town of Berkeley is liberal and, at times, Berkeley students may be relatively liberal, but the university is not.
There have been some other interesting discoveries regarding horizontal gene transfer recently. For example, this PNAS paper looks at sea slugs that can photosynthesize by themselves -- http://www.pnas.org/content/105/46/17867.full.pdf). The sea slugs photosynthesize through a combination of harvesting chloroplasts from the algae they eat and via horizontal transfer of genes involved in photosynthesis from these same algae. This is a bizarre and amazing discovery which demonstrates how genes can move from plants and be incorporated in an animal genome.
Our department (~2,000 employees) updates Office and Windows versions as new machines are bought or if people specifically ask for an upgrade (most users don't have a clue which version they have and do not ask). My old department was the same (500 employees). Even if your department upgraded machines en masse, you still have problems when you collaborate with people from other institutions.
A friend just bought a new laptop with Vista. He can't open his old MS Office documents -- "Office 2007 does not support documents from XYZ version of Word/Excel/etc.," or something to that effect. Clever!
Finally, I've worked at a couple of universities and they seem to do quite well with a diversity of computing systems.
Only problem with this argument is that California is not particularly different from other states in terms of software needs and the vast majority of state workers could accomplish their tasks on a Linux or Mac OS X platform. Perhaps the real reason for the continued pressure is that it provides leverage when it comes to negotiating Microsoft site licenses?
Perhaps it's only a little ironic that some states keep fighting the Microsoft Monopoly yet force their own (state) employees to use Microsoft products. This is true of California (and probably most states). How much do they really care to bust the monopoly if they can't even wean themselves from the convicted monopolist?
How much could California really care about a Microsoft monopoly if they force all state employees to use Windows? So much for the theory about the state going after MS because Apple's headquarters are in Cupertino.
I don't know about other states, but California's state agencies make it essentially impossible for state workers to purchase a computer without Windows. It seems a bit ironic that the state is hassling Microsoft about being a monopoly yet making damn sure that MS maintains a monopoly for state government uses. Perhaps this is just a way for the state to get lower prices for MS products?
Awhile back, we just disallowed the use of Windows across the entire enterprise and now we worry a lot less about our users getting into trouble. Sometimes it's good to examine the assumptions...