US Army Will Upgrade To Windows Vista 374
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."
Re:Free vista! (Score:2, Informative)
You might even get some missile secrets on the drives. Our secret of course..
"Computer hard drive sold on eBay 'had details of top secret U.S. missile defence system"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1178239/Computer-hard-drive-sold-eBay-details-secret-U-S-missile-defence-system.html [dailymail.co.uk]
Re:no surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Mod parent up.
Also, the Army is paying attention; both XP and Office 2K3 are in extended support. Microsoft's policy is that they will provide security updates.....unless the problem is going to cost them too much to fix.
For the most part, Microsoft has been pretty good about it, but they didn't fix the RPC vulnerability while NT4 was in extended support -- too hard.
Furthermore, if MS is serious about upgrading every Vista license to Windows 7, the Army really doesn't really lose anything. In fact, they probably save money because Windows 7 is supposed to be more expensive.
Re:You can't wait forever.. (Score:3, Informative)
Absolutely right, I'm not sure why anyone would think adopting bleeding edge on a huge rollout would be a good idea.
Military QA (Score:5, Informative)
The Army probably does the same. Rolling out Vista now is like they started rolling it out on release date. They couldn't have rolled it out any sooner if they wanted to. Same for Windows 7. The earliest they'll see it ok'd for use is probably two years from release. Why people make a big deal out of it? Probably because they're ignorant and want to make a fuss.
Re:You can't wait forever.. (Score:2, Informative)
Agreed. I work for a company with 17,000 employees and it can take a while to 1) get something tested and approved 2) get something rolled out. When you are talking about an OS there is even more involved - Hundreds of apps to test for compatibility, security and group policies, compatibility with old hardware, etc.
Add to that the usual military BS. I did a 4 year stint in the Navy and if I remember correctly it takes 7 signatures just to go on vacation. I can't imagine how many signatures you'd need to roll an OS to 744,000 desktops (Geez that's a huge number. Can that be right?)
Aside from the time it takes to get things done in a huge organization you have the simple fact that Windows 7 is brand new. I wouldn't suggest my mom roll out W7 before SP1. Certainly the friggin military wouldn't do that either.
Half the time I don't use mod points and now that there is something that needs modded up, I don't have any.
This is exactly right. This planning probably started about the time Vista was released. For fuck's sake, does anybody think an organization is just going to press a magic button and upgrade everything and it magically work with every application too?
Re:yes! (Score:2, Informative)
The Russians use Linux
You mean their brand new, very own OS [slashdot.org], right?
Re:The US Air Force rollout (Score:3, Informative)
And they made it very difficult to assign keystrokes...I used to easily map a shortcut for "Paste Unformatted." Had to record a VB macro to do it in 2K7.
Not to nitpick, but it's trivially easy to assign hotkeys. The problem is that there is no pre-existing "Paste Unformatted" command - a problem which existed in Office '03 as well.
Re:Obelix was right. (Score:5, Informative)
All of the Latin I know, I learned from Asterix, so for those who know even less than I do (there must be at least one), SPQR is the Senate and People of Rome, SPQA in this case is of course the Senate and People of America. What santax is referring to is Obelix's often repeated phrase of "these Romans are crazy", and applying it to Americans instead. Perhaps now he won't be modded Offtopic :)
Re:I like vista (Score:3, Informative)
A) You built your own machine later into Vista's lifetime. One of the reasons why Vista is considered so slow is that OEMs were installing Vista onto hardware that should have XP and would have ran XP decently. For example, I worked on a Toshiba with Vista Home Basic installed, the thing had an early Pentium Dual-Core CPU and 512 MB of RAM. The thing just barely crawled along. On the other hand chances are because you build your PCs you know how to install and get cheap RAM. That alone makes you different because you can quite easily get an extra gig of RAM for less than $20 and install it yourself. On the other hand the average Best Buy customer is going to spend ~$75 buying that gig of RAM because of the overpriced memory they sell plus the installation of the RAM by them.
B) Judging from your post you didn't really use XP that much, or when you did things just didn't "click" for you. On the other hand there are some people who had been using XP for everything for the last ~5 years. Then it takes a lot of re-learning to learn, and relearning it a lot more difficult than simply learning.
C) You are computer literate. You know something other than Windows, you actually understand basic computer concepts. You know how to Google and fix problems. This alone puts you above over half of the people who use computers.
Re:Doh! (Score:5, Informative)
Vista is perfectly stable, and any insinuation to the contrary is incorrect.
I use Vista on several machines, and almost never have to reboot, and never crash. Uptime is 24/7.
Since SP1, Vista has been remarkably stable. I do development, and even when software crashes, the OS stays up and running.
I find Vista more stable than XP.
Vista got a horrible reputation out of the gate (and it was pretty well deserved), but since SP1, and as long as you run on sufficient hardware with mature drivers, it's an OS I like significantly better than XP. Sure, it took me some time to get used to the New UI (just as it took me a while to get used to XP after Windows 2000), but right now, any remaining slams against Vista are mostly lazy and uninformed.
Given the way the Military operates, it takes probably years to certify a new software acquisition. They've obviously gone through that work with Vista, and are satisfied enough to roll it out. It's likely they'll begin evaluating Win7 soon after it is released, and will likely upgrade to that in a couple of years or so.
Re:h8 vista h8h8h8 (Score:4, Informative)
my hatred of vista is based off the fact that there is a ton of stupid crap that is loaded on the OS that does nothing but look cool and slow your machine down. I don't want any fucking Aero-transparent window bullshit. I want an os that is like a formula 1 car: fast as hell and without a single non-essential part.
You realize that Aero doesn't slow your machine down, right? The processing is offloaded to the GPU. Now, if you turn Aero off, then you might see a performance hit.
Between win 2k and win7(~8 years) the memory footprint of the OS has grown from ~100mb to ~500mb.
And memory capacities and prices have decreased even faster.
I use the OS for a living. I don't have time to fuck around all day with pretty 'abc block' themes that make the desktop animate windows when they are closed.
And yet people keep going on about how great Compiz is.
Re:Doh! (Score:3, Informative)
You mean this bug? [cnet.com] It was corrected in Windows 98 Second Edition. [wikipedia.org]
Need some education on what UAC is? (Score:3, Informative)
Even UAC is a bizarre hack of a permissive userland, and doesn't use the kernel's security features.
If you can get past the idea that UAC is only the UAC prompt you will see that UAC is indeed much more, and that UAC very much so use the kernel's security features.
Among other things, UAC manipulates the security token of the process, stripping away access rights. This is what is used for both the sandboxing of low integrity processes as well as the elevation prompt.
Normal processes launched by the user is stripped of admin rights by default. Only if the user is actually an admin and only when he tries to access something which requires those rights will the prompt appear. Confirming the UAC elevation prompt will grant the access rights to the process token.
Certain processes - such as Google Chrome and Internet Explorer - are launched in low integrity mode. The process token is stripped of even more rights, preventing it from writing to the registry or to the file system except for an isolated region.
The kernel also ensures that a lower integrity process cannot send messages (or otherwise access) a higher integrity process. So while applications you start on the desktop may send messages to eachother, the IE or Chrome instances cannot send similar messages to desktop apps, even if taken over by an attacker.
Essentially Vista/7 subdivides the user's account based on what he/she is doing. Surfing the internet: low integrity. Running normal, local applications: Normal integrity. Performing admin tasks: Elevated integrity. Installing new applications: Trusted installer integrity.
I don't know about you, but this is distinctly a kernel feature in my book. Specifics here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc138019.aspx [microsoft.com]