That's… I don't know. Baffling? Yeah, let's go with that. To think that I was struggling with one of my professor's explanation why the university grid still offers (in parallel to Debian stable stack) some 'ancient' versions of compilers like Python 2.4 or GCC 3.2. Or why it took until 1996 to start using Fortran 90 instead of 77 and C99 was used instead of the ~ANSI only since 2007. Why are so many institution opposed to upgrading? I get that the cost is nothing to sneeze at, but this just feels silly. What's next, Pentagon still using hub-based network infrastructure because this newfangled MAU are expensive? ;PThey were running software on Windows 95. This was in, I think 2013?
IE6?
I think it's often a case of some weird inertia how jacked government acquisition processes are pragmatism (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). A few years back, I worked for the state deciding unemployment claims (i.e. I'd do a hearing and decide whether someone got benefits). Once we did a hearing, we had two options. One, we could write our decision via a telnet client, where the program we used could not do line breaks or word wrapping in the editor (thankfully they would print okay). But we had to put in paragraph breaks via a special character so that when the decision was printed, it would look right. The other option was to dictate your decision into a little java applet so that a bunch of typists we had on staff could then deal with the ancient editor. I should add that all of our state's IT infrastructure is provided by Northrop Grumman, who generally suck (and is likely going to be sued by the state in the near future). It's a mess. I also worked for the state Medicaid system in a similar capacity, and our infrastructure there was even dumber, but that was due to incompetent management in my department rather than any external factors. Oh yeah! I'd forgotten. I interned with the attorney general's office when I was in law school, so this would've been early 2008, and the computer in the closet they assigned me to was still running Windows 2000.Why are so many institution opposed to upgrading? I get that the cost is nothing to sneeze at, but this just feels silly.