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re: IRS computers crashed 10 days after House committee sent letter asking...
Posted on 6/23/14 at 3:59 pm to Bard
Posted on 6/23/14 at 3:59 pm to Bard
quote:
Go back and read my edit. Most IT shops are loathe to run a mixed environment so when they make the decision to swap users over, they do so with the quickness. With ~90k employees they could transition out a computer for something NICE ($2k, which is/should be about 2x what they need to for a good desktop) for every employee for about $180 mill (which is just a small portion of their +1.8B annual IT budget).
With all that said, I would be shocked if they weren't buying new machines and just putting XP on them (because they apparently aren't spending their IT money on backups, amirite?)
I hear you Bard, but again here is my experience. You are buying off a government contract and as usual you can buy a computer on open market cheaper. SO the $2000 may be low. I had that conversation many times when I was a Fed. I could walk into Best Buy and purchase a more powerful machine for half the cost. Also, budgets don't allow for new machines to be purchased for everyone every year or even very 3 years.
What I'm trying to say in all these posts of mine is this: It all looks suspicious and there may be wrongdoing, but what many of you are latching onto as proof and or indications may not be so and can be explained. Huge federal agencies, their business practices and budget implementations can't be compare to private companies (and that may be unfortunate).
3
Posted on 6/23/14 at 4:12 pm to wfeliciana
quote:
What I'm trying to say in all these posts of mine is this: It all looks suspicious and there may be wrongdoing, but what many of you are latching onto as proof and or indications may not be so and can be explained.
I would agree if you look at one piece of evidence, but when you look at everything. The fact the the IG has already found targeting, the lack of cooperation, the evidence of Congress asking for targeting, the fact that confidential information was sent to the FBI for investigations, hard drives crashing, no backups, etc. You get a clear picture that there was illegal activity.
Posted on 6/23/14 at 4:21 pm to wfeliciana
quote:
Huge federal agencies, their business practices and budget implementations can't be compare to private companies
They don't have to be. This is a discussion about hardware and data retention policy. When you work for the government, they don't hand you special drives you don't see commonly used in the public sector. They are the same you and I use at home.
Hard drives have a median lifespan of about 6 years. Some last longer. Some fall well short of that. New equipment is purchased so there is sure to be a mixture of newer and older systems as time goes on. What I never see..........what I have never even heard of, is 8 drives irreparably crashing from a select few within the same time period. It defies the law of averages and logic.
Posted on 6/23/14 at 4:26 pm to wfeliciana
quote:
You are buying off a government contract and as usual you can buy a computer on open market cheaper. SO the $2000 may be low. I had that conversation many times when I was a Fed. I could walk into Best Buy and purchase a more powerful machine for half the cost. Also, budgets don't allow for new machines to be purchased for everyone every year or even very 3 years.
I work on the State level, we spent 2012-2013 upgrading 95% of our users to Windows 7 either with new computers or adding RAM to current computers that had qualifying processors. Among our 600-700 users we have only 4 whose new machines might be in the $2k range, and those 4 do work with multiple TIFF files at a time (really, really big pics, for the non-IT crowd). The rest of the desktops were under $1k with the few laptops we purchased being about $1,200. No idea what they are using at the IRS, but we use Dells here and get a decent discount because we do so much business with them. An agency as large as the IRS should be getting a much better deal (but then again the federal government has never been known as "thrifty").
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