Texas Senate Proposes a Budget With a No-Vista-Upgrades Rider 290
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.'"
Re:Good (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Bill of attainder? (Score:3, Informative)
Not unless all laws outlawing purchasing certain products, like PCP and nuclear weapons, are also bills of attainder (which they aren't).
MOLP? (Score:4, Informative)
If they are enterprise, they most likely have a MOLP, which if its current they paid for Vista anyway.
that will save lots of money (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that there's really no reason to "upgrade" to Vista, and at twice the price for slower speeds and performance, not to mention the mandatory RAM and video card costs, this is a wise budgetary precaution.
Just don't mandate netbooks - they have a tendancy to walk away.
Re:ROFL; but stupid (Score:3, Informative)
It may not be as stupid as it appears.
For example the city counsel here ahs forbid the upgrade to Vista for anyone due to a myryiad of issue, many dealing with legacy issues. Add to that the fact that XP works fine it would be econimically stupid to implement Vista.
And it's not really practical to think that mean Microsoft is being singled out. It's not like the users are going to upgrade to anything else.
Texas BOR (Score:4, Informative)
If any agency already has a contract their law means diddly squat. The historical meaning of bill of attainder is to try and convict a person or group in the legislature. It may apply to a product if it can be seen as inflicting punishment on Microsoft.
No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, retroactive law, or any law impairing the obligation of contracts, shall be made.
Texas's constitution still has the post WWII eugenics provisions, how quaint.
IT manager for a small govt org in TX (Score:3, Informative)
As an IT manager for a small govt org in Texas, it would not surprise me one bit if this was not actually requested by some of my more politically influential colleagues.
I and my group are avoiding Vista like the plague, mostly because of the unnecessary expense of the hardware upgrades it'll require, but also additionally because of the additional end-user training it'll require.
We're having a hell of a time just getting our users to recover their productivity after the Office 2007 mess that was rammed down our throats, and most of them still hate Office 2007 with a bloody passion. We do not wish to repeat this ordeal with a changeout of the whole desktop operating system anytime soon.
Re:that will save lots of money (Score:5, Informative)
Even more importantly, do not EVER let anybody in your company or government upgrade to a newer version of Office, because the moment that lid is opened, there's no going back.
Re:Oy (Score:5, Informative)
There is no IT dept for the entire State of Texas. So, first of all, your analogy is flawed.
Secondly, the legislature writes the budget for the state's OS upgrades. It is certainly within their purview to forbid an especially worthless OS on a cost/benefit basis, regardless of technical considerations.
Re:The Media (Score:4, Informative)
Actually it isn't. Moving From XP to Vista is a big issue, especially if you have a lot of legacy apps.
Re:budget stuffs (Score:3, Informative)
If the government is paying retail prices for licensing 50,000 computers they are complete idiots and deserve to be flogged and burned at the stake for utter waste.
I do not know what the bulk licensing price would be to an organization with 50,000 computers but I suspect it would be less than $5 each for Vista. Add on Microsoft Office 2007 and I suspect you might be talking about $50 per machine. Yes, that would be $2,500,000 dollars. But nowhere near $200 per machine.
Re:The Media (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why Bother (Score:3, Informative)
.....
Because there have been numerous betas that have blown both Vista and even XP out of the water?
http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12554_22-278706-34.html [zdnet.com]
[] ...or that it is even improving as it progresses through beta:
http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12554_22-278706-35.html [zdnet.com]
Yeah, I know....someone backing up their statements on Slashdot with actual results? What was I thinking?
Re:New Fed computers come with - XP! (Score:3, Informative)
Of course it's probably been sitting in a warehouse for three years...
Not necessarily, when using (for example) the Dell website under the Federal customer option, XP is a standard choice--- got a truly new XP laptop (newest hardware) 1-2 months ago.
Re:New Fed computers come with - XP! (Score:2, Informative)
Last I checked XP was still an option on the dell website for ordinary customers buying buisness machines. I think it's even an option on one or two of thier consumer machines.
Re:this language will be removed (Score:5, Informative)
I would wager that a significant portion of them are still running Windows XP (if not OS X) and have little or no experience with Vista aside from what their son's best friend's cousin's neighbor told them.
Let me help. I work for a global IT firm with more than 30,000 employees. We sell a lot of Microsoft kit. And internally we have chosen to skip Vista because it's proven to be too bloody problematic in several rather extensive pilot studies.
Apologies for posting AC here, this is one post I really would not be able to get away with.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Informative)
There are some flash-based players which are freely available. You could also just upload them to youtube if you're not trying to prevent access. I think that's probably a more logical decision.
Re:Sigh (Score:1, Informative)
None. Give me a link to the MPEG.
Re:Why Bother (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft made a LOT of changes to the OS and to the way both developers *AND* users used the operating system.
But all of these changes were really good changes that needed to be done.
UAC? It was necessary. Could it have been implemented better? Not really. What it does is provide a good gray area between "running as a standard user" and "running as an administrator".
On top of the addition of ASLR (improved in SP1), Vista's security is far improved over XP's.
And finally, low integrity processes.
The reason why developers hated the OS is because it does things that they aren't used to that they should have been doing in the first place. Applications were storing user configuration data in C:\Program Files rather than in C:\Documents & Settings\%Username%.
Imagine if say, applications in linux stored all of its user configuration data in
So there were some growing pains there when Microsoft enforced that.
Now, with Windows 7 itself. The general improvements over Vista is that Microsoft went in and optimized the performance on the OS. They have software that tracks performance data and allows them to work on areas that slow down for whatever reason. They updated the display driver moel (though it is fully backwards compatible with WDDM1.0) which allows the window manager to use less memory and higher performance.
They added some really nifty features for using Windows on wide screens and touch screens.
And honestly I could really make a huge list on the improvements that the "Vista" architecture has made to Windows.
Windows 7 is a polished Windows Vista that also has the benefit of a couple of years of age. Since it's based on the same architecture, most compatibility issues have been worked out of the drivers and applications.
But all of this doesn't necessarily mean it's an improvement in these corporate or government IT infrastructures. IT Policy should at the very least provide many of the protections that Vista offers, minus the behind the scenes stuff (ASLR, Protected Mode IE). So while it's a great product, it is definitely hard to make a case for upgrading in the corporate sector.
Re:Why Bother (Score:3, Informative)
For one, if you use sudo within the context of a terminal window--it does not carry over to another terminal window, nor does it carry over to applications you're running within any GUI environment.
Either way, you still have to prefix every command you run with "sudo".
Also, do you really want administrative privileges carried over between applications when you're installing things? While you trust the "repository" for your distribution which downloads and installs needed dependencies for you, you very likely (and should not) trust a random application you download in a Windows environment from some 3rd party website.
The same is if you were to install multiple applications rather than loading it up with one command that grabs all the dependencies.
You generally know what "sudo apt-get install mysql" is going to do for the system. But in a Windows environment, you don't know whether Application B that Application A launched is something you should trust with Administrative rights to the PC.
So it's a fundamental usage design difference between the two systems, not a problem with UAC itself.
Besides, in Windows 7 they give all you guys that just cannot stand clicking "yes or no" a little slider to adjust the prompts, and any application that may modify the system or anything you do gets a little shield icon.
Re:ROFL; but stupid (Score:3, Informative)
If we paid for the $99 XP Pro upgrade, we'd be in effect paying double for each computer to use our site license (it comes with Vista, you pay to also get XP, but then we wipe it and put our copy anyhow). It's cheaper to get Vista.
Re:this language will be removed (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, there's no fundamental differece between Vista and Windows 7 (which is Windows 6.0 R2). Microsoft is quietly laughing at all of this - everyone said "we're skipping Vista", so they just rebranded Vista and slapped on a different-looking GUI (which means in most people's eyes it's a totally different OS). If there are enough fixes in the Vista service pack called "Windows 7" to make it tolerable, then this isn't a total scam, but it is humorous.
Re:Not at all (Score:3, Informative)
In both cases, the monies involved are not actually bonuses. They're salary.
The corporate executives take their paycheck as a 'bonus' for tax reasons. The motivations of the congressmen should not need explanation.
Re:this language will be removed (Score:4, Informative)
Vista Service Pack? I've already installed 2 of them. I've also installed Windows 7.
The Windows 7 upgrade was far more profound than either service pack.
Re:Oy (Score:3, Informative)
I mean, where I work we're not upgrading to Vista either. But that was a decision made by IT, after actually looking into it. I highly doubt the politicians have any idea of what they're talking about.
Some large number of years ago I worked at a very large company that deliberately decided not to upgrade the office suite. (Think it was probably the upgrade to office 97, possibly the upgrade after that).
There were procedures in place to handle the handful of cases where things were coming from outside the company that needed converting back to the version of office we were using.
But the upgraded office started trickling in anyway (I don't know for certain but I suspect it started with senior management). Within a year it became essential to upgrade the entire company. Something like 100k desktops upgraded that probably actually benefited 100 people.
That's the advantage for the poor beleaguered IT departments. "Someone very senior" who doesn't know what they are doing can no longer ORDER that their system is "upgraded". "It's illegal" is hard to argue with.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the IT people had actually been lobbying for this rule. It really doesn't sound like something politicians would make up all on their own.
Tim.