Re: Microsoft wins Homeland Security Bid ( Reuters)

[Ross Dmochowski <rossd () cns me berkeley edu>]

On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 17:31, northern snowfall wrote:
> Even if you mod out an OS like Linux, you are still stuck with
> the inability of support at a large scale, since other groups will
> stray from supporting your distro as its codebase isn't as well
> known and may be more advanced/abstract.
> Don

Most gov't functionaries require only kiosk-like application
functionality. Email, Word-processing. 
Any more power than that, and you have wasted hours of
taxpayer time sucked up with listening to mp3's and playing
M$ Solitaire.
And thin-clients have obvious security advantages.
Patch-management is limited to the boxxen serving up the thin-clients, 
et alii.
And plopping a P4 on someone's desk to do word-processing is like
giving someone a hammer to put a stamp on an envelope.
Unless you don't mind them running Kazaa to make use of your
fat pipes, or leaking info via ICQ.

-- 
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research,
would it?
-- Albert Einstein


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