Full proof plan
Hand out free copies of Windows to the people smugglers. They won't have time to smuggle anyone because they will be too busy staring at 'Installing updates - please wait' messages.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) has announced a contract worth an estimated $1.76bn for Microsoft Enterprise Services. The contract, which is set to run for five years until 10 Jan 2024, will see the Windows giant supplying the DoD, the US Coast Guard and intelligence community with a variety of services, such as support …
Imagine you have high payed developers which cost you 100k a year. That's actually 17600 years worth of developer time. To put that into perspective, the Windows 3.1 team had around 20 people working for a few year to develop it. The Cray 1 was developed by a team about the same size within a few years.
You could easily use that money to develop a custom computing architecture from scratch. One that will avoid security problems by clients not having an elaborated attack surface, one that just does what it's supposed to do.
In fact you could even spend 10% of that an really boost academic security research, you'd probably reach a goal where you get a full operating system which can be proven to be free from a large number of bug classes by your compiler while it compiles.
Spending all of that money just to get a legacy operating system to somehow work seems like a total waste to me.
Spending all of that money just to get a legacy operating system to somehow work seems like a total waste to me.
That is very true...
But you have to accept that your suggestion requires a whole load of people to think outside the beltway(box) for more than half a nanosecond.
MS would never propose it in the first place. That would just be too radical and NIH for the Redmond Hipsters.
Besides once the DevOps and [insert current buzzword here] people got involved the small team of 20-30 would be 20-30,000. /s /s
Probably. In how many years, though?
Plus, you'll have to re-develop any application you need to run on it.
Meanwhile, the Defense has to keep on running.
It could also start to build planes, tanks, ships, guns, etc. etc. itself - would you like such government? Looks very much alike Soviet Union to me.
We could discuss if that sum is OK or very bloated, though.
"That's actually 17600 years worth of developer time. "
But only 1.6 x Streets of Monaco yachts.
"Spending all of that money just to get a legacy operating system to somehow work seems like a total waste to me."
They already succeeded with that. Linux is now in the Windows Store.
The initial version of Linux was developed by 1 college kid. But your point is well taken, get a small, competent team together and let them at it. You would probably have a truly modern OS in a couple of years. Given that all the common commercials are lineal descendents of 40+ year code it might a very good idea.
"You would probably have a truly modern OS in a couple of years"
They aren't buying an OS though, so that would not be time well spent. People don't really spent cycles worrying about OS these days. Not productive people anyway. They don't do cable management either, or patch fibre. In case you're curious they also don't use label makers to neatly and precisely identify their servers.
Instead they buy commodity compute from global scale cloud providers like Microsoft and Amazon and worry about the detail that gives them value. That's not an OS. Both OS's are just fine these days. Linux is cheap and works, Windows is less cheap but easier/cheaper to manage at SMB/SME scale. Both are supported in both big clouds, and the other clouds too. Let's be honest though, if you personally installed an OS this year you've made a wrong turn somewhere or are very early in career.
The initial version of Linux did very little - and was a simple kernel lacking all of the features you expect from a modern kernel running on multi-core CPUs. And it lacked all the tools and utilities needed to make it something usable - it was lucky that being Unix-alike GNU made them available easily from Unix code. And still, it took years to become really usable - and still, it lacks many professional applications.
Start a new OS from scratch, and it will take years to make it usable. It's no surprise that most "new" OS are built over something already existing (look at Android, Linux+Java, or macOS, Mach+BSD+Next), because the effort and costs to start anew would be very, very high.
https://www.berlin-mauer.de/videos/walter-ulbricht-zum-mauerbau-530/
@1:04
Berlin, 1961, GDR dictator in person: Nobody intends to erect a wall.
That became the lie of 60's and 70's, will Trump's "Mexico will pay for the wall" become the lie of decades to come or will this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdIHzLsELyA it is either, it is as simple as that ...
Fun times in times of dire straights for the minions running the US state, my thoughts with you! Can we not crowd-fund something ? I'm pretty sure at least 35% of the free world would happily pay into it ...
“..custom changes to Microsoft source-code when applicable”
Holy fuck, the DoD is doomed. Given how Microsoft can't manage its own planned changes and updates without borking everything every month, I would be exceedingly wary of any "custom" changes.
Might be better to have a primary update section, with a hundred PCs of all required configurations, and start updating those first to find out what is still running after Patch Tuesday.
Unless, of course, those "custom changes" are actually just a central Windows Update Hub computer with a big red button labelled "Take Your Chances". Then I get it.
The DoD already paid to develop a "Highly Secure Linux" years ago. Perhaps they could just dump 100million into developing a more pleasant GUI and call it a day. There are Linux-compatible databases-a-plenty in use by serious industries. It is the most common operating system in AWS instances. I suspect it is the Video Game Players that form the MS Windows power constituency.
“Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) is a Linux LiveCD, (or LiveUSB), developed and publicly distributed by the United States Department of Defense’s Software Protection Initiative[2] that is designed to serve as a secure end node. It can run on almost any Intel-based computer (PC or Mac). LPS boots only in RAM, creating a pristine, non-persistent end node. It supports DoD-approved Common Access Card (CAC) readers, as required for authenticating users into PKI-authenticated gateways to access internal DoD networks" ref
01. Goldman Sachs $11.5m
02. Microsoft $7.2m
03. J.P. Morgan $6.2m ref
Lobbying: $15,910,000 (2017-2018) '91 out of 115 Microsoft Corp lobbyists in 2017-2018 have previously held government jobs '
For $1.76 billion, MS will make Clippy sentient, omnipresent and so gung-ho for the stars & stripes that John Wayne will look like a communist tree-hugging vegan by comparison. Imagine the horror America's enemies will feel as Clippy barges into their systems and screws them over as only MS code can!!
"It looks like you are planning to plant a bomb at Disney World. I'm not going to help you with that!! Screw you, ISIS!! In fact, chew on some blue screen of death while I encrypt your hard drive and screw up your Active Directory profile!!"
The problem with this post is that it will typically be read in two different ways:
1. English English - it's obviously completely sarcastic
2. American English - it's obviously completely sincere.
This may be why no-one has voted on it yet. Whilst to me, a real English speaker the sarcasm is funny, I'm wary of up-voting it for fear of encouraging the Trumpites.
NB, Trump was once a bourgeois euphemism for Fart. Now it's literal.
This may be why no-one has voted on it yet. Whilst to me, a real English speaker the sarcasm is funny, I'm wary of up-voting it for fear of encouraging the Trumpites.
NB, Trump was once a bourgeois euphemism for Fart. Now it's literal.
And yet, not a one has suggested that the money could be used to build a wall instead?