Labour says police use of XP poor planning

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surfisup1000

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#144149 8-May-2014 21:31

"Labour information technology spokeswoman Clare Curran said the $455,100 police had to spend buying extended support from Microsoft for the 9400 computers was a waste and she believed the situation might be mirrored in other parts of the public sector."

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/60055079/labour-says-police-use-of-xp-poor-planning.html

Why on earth didn't the cops dump XP ages ago?

Is this just another govt department who doesn't care about wasting taxpayer money or do they have a good reason? I think probably the former.

If it is the former, I'd expect someone to be fired for negligence.

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meow
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#1040418 8-May-2014 22:36

Police Officers are not the smartest when it comes to IT.

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
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gzt

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#1040419 8-May-2014 22:39

Labour says police use of XP poor planning

Well I'd like to see more evidence of that.

Why on earth didn't the cops dump XP ages ago?

This is a very good question to ask in Parliament. If it is asked there might be a good answer.

Is this just another govt department who doesn't care about wasting taxpayer money or do they have a good reason?

The reality is that Microsoft has been trying to end support for XP for many years and failed many times. The team who (I assume) carefully evaluated and made the decision(s) to stick with XP should probably be congratulated in the circumstances for all the money they have saved over that time. In the endgame phase to put it in perspective the cost of $455,100 over 9400 machines is around $48 per machine.

"A police spokesman said it expected to finish migrating computers to Windows 8.1 later this year."

ROTFL!! Imho this is the seriously questionable part, but also it is the hardest for the average person to understand why in a simple soundbite. In addition to W8 teething problems to deal with, this decision almost certainly has a consequence of some serious single vendor lock-in in other line of business services and applications and headaches for other vendors for many years to come starting now. The sales team in Microsoft that got that one sold would have had a massive party after that sale went through. No doubt there were some over the top 'minority report' futuristic style product demonstrations in there as well. I find it hard to believe a team that made the decision to stick with XP would have fallen for that one. Different dept is my guess.

wasabi2k

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#1040420 8-May-2014 22:40

Does anyone know what Clare Curran is like in terms of knowledge?

Plenty of places are stuck on XP - for a variety of reasons. Not ideal no.

Stinks of typical uninformed political bollocks.

charsleysa

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#1040432 8-May-2014 23:02

gzt:
Labour says police use of XP poor planning

Well I'd like to see more evidence of that.

Why on earth didn't the cops dump XP ages ago?

This is a very good question to ask in Parliament. If it is asked there might be a good answer.

Is this just another govt department who doesn't care about wasting taxpayer money or do they have a good reason?

The reality is that Microsoft has been trying to end support for XP for many years and failed many times. The team who (I assume) carefully evaluated and made the decision(s) to stick with XP should probably be congratulated in the circumstances for all the money they have saved over that time. In the endgame phase to put it in perspective the cost of $455,100 over 9400 machines is around $48 per machine.

"A police spokesman said it expected to finish migrating computers to Windows 8.1 later this year."

ROTFL!! Imho this is the seriously questionable part, but also it is the hardest for the average person to understand why in a simple soundbite. In addition to W8 teething problems to deal with, this decision almost certainly has a consequence of some serious single vendor lock-in in other line of business services and applications and headaches for other vendors for many years to come starting now. The sales team in Microsoft that got that one sold would have had a massive party after that sale went through. No doubt there were some over the top 'minority report' futuristic style product demonstrations in there as well. I find it hard to believe a team that made the decision to stick with XP would have fallen for that one. Different dept is my guess.

Windows 8.1 is a fine OS with better optimizations and features than Windows 7 and Windows XP.

Yes there is a learning curve but with a proper training session and a government help guide any issues can be mitigated.

Windows 8.1 with Modern UI allows for new applications to be developed and allow updates to be pushed out to all devices and in easier, more controlled manner.

Regards
Stefan Andres Charsley

mattwnz

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#1040434 8-May-2014 23:13

It is just normal political sparring, they wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't say this, and it is needed for a democracy. But it is yet again another poorly researched article. It doesn't say how long the support that money covers. If it is one year, them that is just 45 bucks per pc. But it could be 3 years, who knows for sure.
I wouldn't say windows 8 is a fine OS on older pcs, and use it on an old PC dual booting with win 7, and 8 regally freezes for no reason. . I expect most of their pcs running xo, would be more than 5 years old and would struggle with windows 8, and I suspect the other reason they are still using it is due t the software they use not being compatible.

charsleysa

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#1040439 8-May-2014 23:21

mattwnz: It is just normal political sparring, they wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't say this, and it is needed for a democracy. But it is yet again another poorly researched article. It doesn't say how long the support that money covers. If it is one year, them that is just 45 bucks per pc. But it could be 3 years, who knows for sure.
I wouldn't say windows 8 is a fine OS on older pcs, and use it on an old PC dual booting with win 7, and 8 regally freezes for no reason. . I expect most of their pcs running xo, would be more than 5 years old and would struggle with windows 8, and I suspect the other reason they are still using it is due t the software they use not being compatible.

Yes for older PC's there's more likely going to be issues but PC's need to be upgraded at some point. Though in saying that Windows 8 should be able to handle plenty of the existing computers when fresh installed.

Regards
Stefan Andres Charsley

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lxsw20

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#1040453 9-May-2014 00:15

wasabi2k: Does anyone know what Clare Curran is like in terms of knowledge?

Plenty of places are stuck on XP - for a variety of reasons. Not ideal no.

Stinks of typical uninformed political bollocks.

She's not technical from what I have seen.

surfisup1000

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#1040455 9-May-2014 00:18

gzt:
Labour says police use of XP poor planning

Well I'd like to see more evidence of that.

The XP expiry date is almost like 'y2k' I suppose.

From what I can tell MS only gave 1 year warning for end of support but windows 7 has been out for 5 years so this will have been anticipated.

But, maybe it is cheaper to leapfrog win7 and pay the 460k in support to M so they can go straight to win8. This could mean one less upgrade cycle.

Over 9000 PC's, it's a fair bit of cost to upgrade. For me to upgrade my OS and reinstall apps can take nearly a day. But, I'd think they would be more efficient than myself and be using common images.

The only thing i'm sure about after thinking more is that this is being politicized.

mattwnz

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#1040457 9-May-2014 01:03

surfisup1000:
gzt:
Labour says police use of XP poor planning

Well I'd like to see more evidence of that.

The XP expiry date is almost like 'y2k' I suppose.

From what I can tell MS only gave 1 year warning for end of support but windows 7 has been out for 5 years so this will have been anticipated.

But, maybe it is cheaper to leapfrog win7 and pay the 460k in support to M so they can go straight to win8. This could mean one less upgrade cycle.

Over 9000 PC's, it's a fair bit of cost to upgrade. For me to upgrade my OS and reinstall apps can take nearly a day. But, I'd think they would be more efficient than myself and be using common images.

The only thing i'm sure about after thinking more is that this is being politicized.

Surely they would just use images, as the files would be stored on seperate servers.

farcus

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#1040458 9-May-2014 01:17

Curran said . . . demonstrated the value of Labour's policy of encouraging the use of open-source software.

This is certainly an excellent policy to have.
A lot of European governments have had open-source policies in place for a number of years and it seems to be working very well for them.
It would of course be a steep learning curve but would save the country (taxpayer) a lot of money in the long term.

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#1040460 9-May-2014 01:58

correction - the entire beaurocracy is not very smart.

if they hired a consultant to decide whether to stay on XP, move from XP to win 7, move from XP to win 8, that would cost them $10 million, so 0.5 million is cheap

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nathan

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#1040465 9-May-2014 05:52

surfisup1000:
gzt:
Labour says police use of XP poor planning

Well I'd like to see more evidence of that.

The XP expiry date is almost like 'y2k' I suppose.

From what I can tell MS only gave 1 year warning for end of support but windows 7 has been out for 5 years so this will have been anticipated.

But, maybe it is cheaper to leapfrog win7 and pay the 460k in support to M so they can go straight to win8. This could mean one less upgrade cycle.

Over 9000 PC's, it's a fair bit of cost to upgrade. For me to upgrade my OS and reinstall apps can take nearly a day. But, I'd think they would be more efficient than myself and be using common images.

The only thing i'm sure about after thinking more is that this is being politicized.

It's a lot longer than 1 years notice

End of mainstream support
April 14, 2009

End of extended support
April 8, 2014

nathan

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#1040466 9-May-2014 05:56

gzt:
Labour says police use of XP poor planning

Well I'd like to see more evidence of that.

Why on earth didn't the cops dump XP ages ago?

This is a very good question to ask in Parliament. If it is asked there might be a good answer.

Is this just another govt department who doesn't care about wasting taxpayer money or do they have a good reason?

The reality is that Microsoft has been trying to end support for XP for many years and failed many times. The team who (I assume) carefully evaluated and made the decision(s) to stick with XP should probably be congratulated in the circumstances for all the money they have saved over that time. In the endgame phase to put it in perspective the cost of $455,100 over 9400 machines is around $48 per machine.

"A police spokesman said it expected to finish migrating computers to Windows 8.1 later this year."

ROTFL!! Imho this is the seriously questionable part, but also it is the hardest for the average person to understand why in a simple soundbite. In addition to W8 teething problems to deal with, this decision almost certainly has a consequence of some serious single vendor lock-in in other line of business services and applications and headaches for other vendors for many years to come starting now. The sales team in Microsoft that got that one sold would have had a massive party after that sale went through. No doubt there were some over the top 'minority report' futuristic style product demonstrations in there as well. I find it hard to believe a team that made the decision to stick with XP would have fallen for that one. Different dept is my guess.

Re the sales, Have you heard of the NZ All Of Government agreement?

Do you think Vodafone & Apple had a massive party when they sold them 10,000 iOS devices and achieved some serious single vendor lockin, as you put it?

Jase2985

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#1040468 9-May-2014 06:12

the defense force is in the same boat, still on XP for most of their computers

There is just no simple/cost effective way to upgrade the OS on thousands of computers. they are probably running server 2003 as well which would need to be upgraded so there would be a lot of work involved in designing and testing the new network.

and like someone mentioned some hardware would need upgraded.

We use a scripted install at work off an image on a USB drive. im not sure if they deploy if over the network though

jonathan18

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#1040515 9-May-2014 08:25

Jase2985: the defense force is in the same boat, still on XP for most of their computers

I don't think that's correct - I believe many if not most of our computers have already been shifted across to running Windows 7 with a Citrix client.

Jase2985: We use a scripted install at work off an image on a USB drive. im not sure if they deploy if over the network though

Nope, we had local IT support physically installing Windows 7 on each PC; I assume this was partly because many people have specific software on their computer which needed to be reinstalled on the local machine (given Office etc is only available via Citrix).

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