Straight to 8: London's Met Police hatches Win XP escape plan The Metropolitan Police are bypassing Windows 7 and going straight to Windows 8 as they ditch Windows XP from nearly 40,000 PCs. But the force will not have finished the move before April’s end-of-support deadline from Microsoft. Rather, the Met has agreed a custom support agreement with Microsoft to keep Windows XP machines …
"The bluff has more credibility since Munich went FOSS."
Unless it was issues around 2005, the bluff has ZERO credibility. Why? Because as you rightly point out it took Munich 10 years (and they are still not Windows free). If the Met started now, with the best will in the world, they would not finish until around 2020 and would need to run XP/migrate to 7 until that time.
Ergo - bluff is obvious when issued now.
"Though they took the best part of a decade to fully switch"
Actually, they still havnt fully switched - 30-40% of their users still have to use Windows for at least part of the time - so they are still paying for 2 stacks after a decade!
HP calculated that including the Limux OS development costs it has cost about €30 million more to migrate than updating the Microsoft stack woudl have cost. Probably they will make savings eventually, but it's peanuts versus the time, effort and upheaval involved, and you end up with a less functional environment - e.g still having to use Windows when you require a version of Office that actually works. Hence why pretty much no one else is going down that route.
"Actually, they still havnt fully switched - 30-40% of their users still have to use Windows for at least part of the time"
The latest figures are ~15500 desktops of which 14800 are Linux. Indeed some of them may be using Windows some of the time -so what . I used to use VAX and Alphas and Linux farms from a Windows or Linux desktop
>they took the best part of a decade to fully switch
They still haven't finished the switch - they will hit the target of 13,000-odd Linux seats this year - they are also keeping 2000 seats on Windows 7.
The requirements in Munich were trivial compared to what's being discussed here in the UK.
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There is nothing tech literate or not about staying on Windows or moving to Linux, it's all about functionality and costs. To portray operating a 40k workstation environment as requiring more tech literacy with one system rather than another actually points towards it not being as easy to use or cost effective because you need more highly skilled staff.
"Which is more the pity because from what I have seen at the local Gendarmerie their system works extremely well."
I'm sure your brief observations on the way to the cells provided you with a fully insightful view of the system's advantages and failings.
Windows 7+ works extremely well too. For in most cases of migrating from an existing environment, a lot less hastle and cost to get there.
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How about just switching to Linux?
For that matter, one of the Linux heavy-hitters needs to find out what applications the city uses for its day to day operations, and then go to the creators of them, and offer a bounty on Linux versions of them to be made. (basically covering the cost of porting them)
Once the apps are available, they can start deploying small pockets of Linux clients. Hiring the support personnel as needed. Slowly swapping out their Microsoft-based IT for *nix-based techs.
I mean really, the alternative of going to Windows 8 is laughable, I mean really, anytime I think of a 40 or 50-something doing office work with Windows 8, I laugh.
"anytime I think of a 40 or 50-something doing office work with Windows 8, I laugh
Your contempt to humanity disgusts me. You should be ashamed of yourself"
It's not contempt, its a demonstration of just how ridiculous our yoof are! That's why they are called yoof. They have a lot to learn and simple mistakes like this need to be made so they can learn not to make themselves look stupid again.
(Bet he's got an iPhone. His ill-considered opinion, publicly declared, suggests this to be so.)
"I mean really, the alternative of going to Windows 8 is laughable, I mean really, anytime I think of a 40 or 50-something doing office work with Windows 8, I laugh."
I'm 40 and I can operate a computer running Windows 8, I also do office work on one.
I also know every version of Windows since 3.x, DOS, OS/2, OS/400, most flavours of UNIX and Linux and a whole host of obscure OSes.
I also have a boss who is in his 50s, he is the same. Thanks for the smug patronisation though.
I'm 40 too, surprise, and I almost stroke out every time I have to use Windows 8 (mostly because I have used XP and W7 for so long that I realize when W8 is performing badly at comparable tasks).
And yes I too have installed Cdroms by modifying config.sys and autoexec.bat and fought to find a free IRQ for my SoundBlaster, but "we" are not the people working at police stations are we?
This is mostly what's happening, gradually...
Most new applications are browser (or at least java) based these days, and will usually run on linux even if they don't officially support doing so.
Once you have cross platform apps, the client lock-in is gone and you can choose the client devices which provide the best value on a level playing field - there is very little if any reason to choose windows in this situation.
"I mean really, the alternative of going to Windows 8 is laughable, I mean really, anytime I think of a 40 or 50-something doing office work with Windows 8, I laugh."
WTF? I'm 40+ and use windows 8. It's not that different to previous versions at all really. Everything works and I can just get down to work.
Lets put the whole linux issue to bed!
You can't run public services with linux desktops. Leave linux where it works, running a server.
Windows offers serious support, there is little that can't be done with windows, its ubiquity is part of its strength. If anything doesn't work, an extensive, professional and experienced support network is there to get things running quickly. Not a myriad of support forums full of jack of all trades, who, if they used their sarcasm skills could over come anything.
All other thoughts are now moot as I am proof, windows 8 works, works well and is easily operated by an "aging" user group. Your negativity is just trolling. Trolling to get more shitting macs or linux desktops. Do so, and that "training" issue really does become a serious problem.
As a techie, love it windows or loathe it, as a normal tech user, they want something easy to use and understand. Windows offers this. People should make their own decisions and not listen to their peer group.
The article clearly says:
"Microsoft charges $200 per PC for a Windows XP custom support agreement in the first year, rising to $400 then $800 in years two and three. It’s not clear what the Met will be paying Microsoft to support Windows XP."
200$/PC doesn't sound like "Free" to me.
Keep in mind that the taxpayers actually pays this money. No wonder Bill Gates is the richest man in the world AGAIN! :-(
Actually, they do own a calendar, otherwise the union members wouldn't know what day to go out on strike.
Unfortunately, what they often do have is an unholy combination of abundant red tape, the worst project managers money can buy and an institutionalised mind-set that is highly insular with little appreciation of the real world and the options that are out there.
While HMRC has a huge network of old PCs, it is not clear why.
Their business modus operandi of choice is a mixture of papers and post-people. Offices are still strung across the country and the 'system' requires activity to pass from office to distant office and back again. This is not done via scanned documents accessed via a PC but by shipping papers physically from place to place.
It usually takes from 5 ~ 10 days for papers to travel between offices, no doubt that aids the employment figures but does nothing for speed, efficiency, carbon foot prints or job satisfaction for the clerks involved.
>While HMRC has a huge network of old PCs, it is not clear why.
Unfortunately, as this is a public forum, I'm unable to tell you why certain departments within HMRC are still running legacy desktop OS's - whilst older versions of Windows form the majority, there are other vendors OS's still in use...
Coincidentally, I'm once again watching my Yes Minister collection.
Having read this article, in light of my current experience, I believe that when the circumstances are right, in the fullness of time, you will no doubt be enlightened to learn that the plans concerning this migration are extensive and have been and are still amply discussed at every level.
There is absolutely no lack of planning. On the contrary, every minute detail is being planned and the plan is being revised as we speak. I'm quite sure that the Division of Departmental Planning will have its report ready on time as forecast, in 2016.
the old bill are one of the few organizations that'll genuinely benefit from Win8.
They have - by necessity - a whole lot of touchscreens in their support load. All of those currently have touch layers over XP (which suck) and all are integrated into LDAP and centrally managed except mobile (ie traffic) units which have a third-party interface that everyone hates and are roughly as manageable as a tiger with a roman candle up its bum.
The met will gain native touch support and the ability to integrate their management platform. Although I understand they've toyed with iPads (see what I did there?) so they'll still be supporting multiple OS's.
> Except that the set of touch hardware supported by both Windows XP and Windows 8 is miniscule and may not in fact exist.
That's actually not the case. I was surprised to find that in-car ANPR and supporting systems are all supplied with a minimum of a Core 2 Duo chip and 1GB of RAM. Since the C2D chip supports DX9 and Win8 supports both resistive and capacitive touchscreens, all of those little boxes will in fact run Win8 just as well as they run XP.
When I think of old people (in their 50s) the first thing that comes to my mind is how much they love change, and not just a little, but the kind where you are removing everything they have ever used and replacing it with something completely new. Yep, old people love that. //sarcasm
The "from experience" part was meant to be a joke I'm thinking, because what they're going to do is make all their "experience" in operating a computer, worthless overnight.
You are of course absolutely right in that Win8 changes absolutely everything, has no desktop at all and certainly can't be configured to behave in exactly the same way as WinXP at all under any circumstances.
Further, there are no Start Menu replacements available and you certainly can't set Win8.1 to boot to desktop by default.
Except that all of the above was untrue and you might want to think before kneejerking.
"Further, there are no Start Menu replacements"
Right, and the first thing most people do when buying a new car is buy one that runs on diesel, then drive it off the lot straight to an aftermarket shop and buy a non-diesel engine to put in it? This is not an excuse. If it was a good design, this wouldn't be necessary.
"and certainly can't be configured to behave in exactly the same way as WinXP at all under any circumstances"
Um, It can't.
Name one, ok, Find. Search and Find are not the same, and Search breaks workflow like nothing I've ever seen before (yes we can buy Agent Ransack, but why need to).
Name a second. Wifi. Go ahead and set the priority of 3 different Access Points under W8. You can't. (without a 3rd party app)
A third. Mapped drives work like crap (refreshing and twitching worse than a teenager with Restless Leg Syndrome). Lack of policy tools. Lack of built-in VMs. W8.1 has no ISO loading vector. The list goes on and on. But all of that pales in comparison to users being forced into fullscreen Office suites and calculators.
It was a marketing push, to try to push loyal users into an Apple-styled walled-garden, and a lot of us don't like being pushed.
"It was a marketing push, to try to push loyal users into an Apple-styled walled-garden, and a lot of us don't like being pushed."
I think that's the number 1 problem, and that's why everyone is finding fault with the damn thing.
I didn't mind Win8 (after 3rd party add-ons), it's a new OS - some changes are expected. It's mainly the cattle-prod method of encouragement to follow their new revenue stream that made me drop Windows all together.
I'm not a consumer.
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