US government excoriates Microsoft for 'avoidable errors' but keeps paying for its products

You might think that when a government supplier fails in one of its key duties it would find itself shunned or at least feel financial pain. But when that supplier is Microsoft, and the failure allows access to government secrets, it sails serenely onwards – with not much more than promises to do better next time. Microsoft …

[Zibob]

Real recognise real

That's all that happening here.

You start by saying a company should be punished for not fulfilling their duties to the government.

But the government frequently fails to.fulfill anything they say, and what punishment do they get, a fat paycheck, a government car and driver (in a massive great Mercedes) and a massive pension for life.

So all that happening here is Microsoft , coughed gently and nodded back to the accuser and shrugged it shoulders.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Real recognise real

"But the government frequently fails to.fulfill anything they say, and what punishment do they get, a fat paycheck, a government car and driver (in a massive great Mercedes) and a massive pension for life."

While this is true, it's only so because the quality of people that are voted into offices is so seriously lacking.

If the average voter would stop seeing politics like sports where you support "your team" no matter what and refrain from voting for every turd their party puts up for election then maybe government would work better in the interest of the country. The only thing that's worse than party-line voters are the "small government" types who were dim enough to be fooled into believing that businesses are their friends who'd look out for them, so they could be gaslighted into fighting against the only entity that is able to keep businesses in check (government), and thereby against their very own interests.

The Tl;dr is that government sucks only because voters are idiots.

But then, since voters seem to be fine with electing losers, crazies, criminals and wanna-be dictators, you could as well just say that government really only follows the wishes of the People.

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: Real recognise real

"The Tl;dr is that government sucks only because voters are idiots."

Go away.

[alain williams]

"Who do you sue when it is Open Source"

is something that Microsoft shouted a few years ago. Have anyone/many successfully sued Microsoft for bugs in its software ?

[ldo]

Re: "Who do you sue when it is Open Source"

You hire your own experts to take on the responsibility of making the source code work for you. Since their livelihood is in your hands, it is in their interest to provide quality support.

That’s got to be better than trying to get the attention of a massive multinational megacorp that puts the interests of its shareholders before those of its customers.

[Doctor Syntax]

"You might think that when a government supplier fails in one of its key duties it would find itself shunned"

It's a balls in vice situation - and it's not Microsoft's balls.

[Excused Boots]

Indeed, we are in a position where a major private company can effectively say, ‘you know what Uncle Sam, if you don’t like it, tough, jog on, what are you going to to eh?’

[Anonymous Coward]

If planes were built like “software”

If planes were built like “software”, wheels would be falling off, doors blowing off in mid flight, bolts would go missing and those responsible would have no sanctions imposed, either monetary or jail-time.

[Notas Badoff]

Re: If planes were built like “software”

Software's more like: "We said it can fly over mountains. We didn't say it could fly over that mountain."

[Alumoi]

Re: If planes were built like “software”

Boeing?

[captain veg]

Re: Boeing

"Time for bed", said Zebedee.

-A.

[EricB123]

Re: If planes were built like “software”

At least when MS Word crashes, nobody dies.

[layer#8]

Re: If planes were built like “software”

Assumptions like that may lead people with limited technical understanding to decisions which could end in such a catastrophic scenario.

[Chris 239]

Re: If planes were built like “software”

When the software crash exposes certain government or security secrets to criminals and then actually yes people do die ☹️

[Anonymous Coward]

Time for a new OS - From Scratch

MS OS is so insanely bloated now. And all most people use a PC for is viewing web pages.

Back in the XP days, we were able to strip out so much useless trash we had it down to the OS using 68M of ram.

we even removed everything to do with printing, deleted everything in the reg that wasn't needed for the OS or to play games.

these days,,,, forgetaboutit.

Time for a new OS from scratch, that isn't based on spying/sales pitchs/bloatware/ in short - greed.

yeah linux is cool, but it to is based on tech that is over 40 years old.

But people will get what they put up with. So we only have legacy OSs (at the core). No wonder security is hard, the structure is built on rotting crap.

[Denarius]

Re: Time for a new OS - From Scratch

so right. Note the history of this thought. CPM/DOS/Win9[5,8] to various PDP11 OS, Unix, Windows NT and descendants, Plan9, Oberon, QNX. None of provable correct OS grew out of niches. I wonder if the huge efforts in memory safe languages and the disaster of Itanic compiler redesign could have been better spent in developing a cross compiler that could generate applications onto small fast OS. I have a preference fpr QNX, but maybe Oberon might be better. Linices are not the answer as it is now so bloated its getting hard to tell difference except one has a choice of desktops.

The obvious objection is the effort to create provably correct libraries for OS primitives. Who wants to create a screen handler for each applications, device drivers, et al. This also assumes hardware is similar enough for some compatibility.

Given the $Gov and corporate demands for inbuilt snooping, such a project[s] would have to be written and run entirely by a well funded dedicated nonprofit based in a country that sneers at lawfare demands from the big players and totalitarian states. Any takers ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Time for a new OS - From Scratch

Agree. Linux only carries forward all the design compromises of UNIX (which itself was born as little more than a compromise developed for limited hardware resources; the real hero at the time was MULTICS). And while Linux has evolved a lot from the old days it still suffers from inherent limitations of being an UNIX. And for desktops, laptops and servers the choice is only between Linux and Windows.

We really need something completely new.

There have been so many great ideas and concepts throughout the many obsolete (and often forgotten) operating systems that came before, Take them and the same from Linux and Windows and create something new.

[abend0c4]

Re: Time for a new OS - From Scratch

We really need something completely new

We do, but we're not going to get it for a number of reasons. The most obvious being that we want most of the existing software to keep running - and that largely assumes either a POSIX or Windows API and both of those, at least implicitly, assume the underlying OS will function in some specific way. More depressingly, the history of operating systems has been one of successive regression followed by a clawing back of the status quo ante and there's presently no indication that will change.

Multics in some ways is still the pinnacle of OS development but its security and flexibility came at a cost - hence Unix which stripped out most of the features and has gradually been putting them back ever since. Minicomputers (such as the PDP-7 on which Unix started) began as a way of providing low(er)-cost computers, mostly for labs, but were necessarily much less complex and generally had very limited memory available, hence operating systems were stripped back to bare essentials. Interestingly, though, even the PDP-1 (or possibly just some of them) had rudimentary security protection: a restricted mode in which certain instructions were disallowed and the ability to bank-switch memory. As minicomputers got more complicated, they grew back most of the features that had been discarded from mainframes and VMS, for example, was indistinguishable from a mainframe operating system.

Then personal computers sent us back before even PDP-1 days with no thought of security at all, but gradually went through the same process and Windows and Linux on modern processors are comparable again to the "advanced" operating systems of the '60s and '70s, though we've stripped out things like multiple protection rings in the interests of portability.

The trouble is we live in a very different world. We're not buying most of our software from computer vendors and writing the rest ourselves. We don't have stable and quantifiable demand. We rent other people's computers and share them with strangers. We have loose working arrangements with people on various contractual terms having access to systems from all over the world. But we still keep revisiting the old solutions of which the most pernicious are all-or-nothing permissions (root, kernel-mode, administrator...) and the notion that security is based on keeping "users" apart.

To the extent we are making any progress, it seems to be reactive - trying to patch up holes in the existing models - rather than trying to imagine something different. It sometimes seems that computer science has fallen down a rabbit hole and is stuck reinventing new ways of doing the same things (programming languages seem to be all the rage presently) rather than looking over the horizon. And that's before we get started on the vested interests...

[ldo]

Re: Time for a new OS - From Scratch

Actually, lots of them do keep coming along.

None has as yet proved to be as functional and adaptable as Linux.

[captain veg]

The problem is

For a significant portion of the population, seemingly including the decision makers in both government and big business, Microsoft and "computing" are synonyms.

I once met a chap who was utterly convinced that Bill Gates invented the internet.

-A.

[Ken Shabby]

Re: The problem is

Don't be silly, we all know it was Al Gore.