
Before Detroit Can Move On, It Needs to Upgrade from Windows XP - ryan_j_naughton
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/before-detroit-can-move-on-it-needs-to-upgrade-from-windows-xp
======
GabrielF00
The soda can alarm system is unbelievable.

Boston has had an electrical fire alarm system for over 100 years. There are
hundreds of call boxes located on city streets. You pull a handle on one of
those boxes and an alarm rings in the city's Fire Alarm building. The
dispatcher can determine which box was pulled and the location. The city
licensed the technology from Samuel Morse, who was living in town at the time.
There's a modern digital system as well, but the fire alarm boxes still work

(I've been inside the Fire Alarm building and seen the original wiring from
the 1920s. It is beautiful.)

~~~
upofadown
But do other cities use the system used in Boston? That seems to me to be the
root of the problem: a lack of standard ways to do standard things. Here in my
city I once got involved with a system that:

* sent serial characters over a modem on a dedicated phone line.

* the characters ended up in a hacked printing terminal.

* that closed a relay that rang the gong in the fire station after the printing terminal had generated the associated document.

So yay! We solved the problem. Unfortunately such "one off" systems tend to be
maintenance nightmares (which is where I came in).

------
alexggordon
I might be alone in this, but I read this article with a sense of giddiness.
Not because I want to see Detroit suffer or fail, but because this is a chance
for a city to completely start over, even technologically.

It's almost never the case that a city is in such shambles that implementing a
completely new technological base would cause less problems than maintaining
the current one. Since it seems Detroit is completely lacking in any
technological foundation currently, this could be a huge chance for them to
remake themselves.

With the huge rush of municipal ISP's, availability and dependency of open
source software, and numerous intelligent startups, Detroit is in a position
to because an incredibly techno-smart city.

Yes I know this would cause issues, and it would change the dynamic of the
city. However, I think facing those problems, and creating all those new jobs
provides a significantly higher potential for stability than whatever the
auto-industry can offer while still not using robots completely manufacture
cars.

Regardless though, this article holds true. Detroit needs to advance, faster
than it ever has in the past, and I really hope they succeed.

~~~
ethbro
> Detroit is in a position to because an incredibly techno-smart city.

Unfortunately, you can't change the weather.

------
debacle
> For example, it costs $62 for the city to cut a single payroll check

This is stunning to me. From some rough calculations, even with very generous
estimates, it cost about $8 to cut a payroll check back when I was in charge
of payroll processing for a medium (5k employees) sized company.

> The payroll system consumes the daily work of 149 full-time employees, of
> which 51 are full-time police officers.

This sounds like a municipal bloat problem, then, and not an IT problem. In
fact, I would bet that most of the city's IT problems are merely symptoms of
the larger problem.

~~~
valarauca1
The city administration itself is to blame.

The city of Detroit indirectly attempted and failed to create a psuedo-
socialist state within itself (I'm a Detroiter).

The City in and of itself is the largest employer within its own boundaries,
because when the city wanted to create new jobs. Its very easy to expand
services, hire new people. Bam new jobs created, and then you can hire
directly from city people, city people stay in the city. Tax dollars come back
to your pocket :D

The problem is then those people who get jobs, move into the suburbs, and the
city loses money because what it hoped to regain in taxes back to itself,
never came.

What this leads to is a TON of people on city pensions, and city health care
who don't live in the city, and haven't for years. Collecting city money,
that's simply being exported to near by suburbs.

~~~
talmand
I've never understood this type of employment logic from a city's perspective.
The city employs a large number of people within it's boundaries, supposedly
in an effort to keep tax revenue inside the city. But these people's paychecks
come from tax revenues in the first place. So unless they have new monies
coming in somehow, it's a circular logic problem that degrades over time until
it collapses.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Hopefully, and usually, long after the politicians who won by doing this are
retired.

~~~
valarauca1
You hit the nail on the head. Sort term (5/10 years) solutions get you
reelected. Long term 25-50 years, get you kicked out after 1 term for a lack
of progress.

------
ExpiredLink
BTW, there's nothing wrong with Windows XP except its planned obsolescence.
AFAIK, an organization can pay Microsoft to extend the support for XP which
probably is the cheapest solution for the town.

~~~
yuhong
_BTW, there 's nothing wrong with Windows XP except its planned obsolescence.
_

Huh? But I agree that Custom Support costs only a few hundred thousand for the
first year at a minimum, but note that the price do increase year to year.

------
visualR
Part of the problem is a lot of IT talent is more interested in building the
latest social networking gizmo than solving Detroit IT problems.

~~~
Agathos
Most coders just happen to like coding. Selling IT services to a government
might involve a little coding, but it's mostly about mastering the procurement
process. Where do you even start with that?

I seem to recall we had a similar discussion in the wake of the disastrous
healthcare.gov rollout. For example,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7855295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7855295)

~~~
fractallyte
I was heartened to discover this UK government-sponsored gem, a free online
course explaining procurement (for beginners): [http://www1.learndirect-
business.com/business-courses/winnin...](http://www1.learndirect-
business.com/business-courses/winning-the-contract/)

There may be some pointers here applicable to the US scene. Nevertheless, it's
good to see management finally realizing the cost benefits of smaller-scale
operators.

~~~
eldelshell
In Medellin, Colombia, they have this fair about government transparency where
the local governments shows to all participants all the different projects,
how much was paid, who participated and specially relevant for your comment,
they teach people and companies how to participate in the whole process.

------
na85
Not sure a better case has been made for Free Software in government.

~~~
jackvalentine
So they could be stuck on something like Red Hat 9 instead? The problem is
only partially the licensing.

~~~
na85
Well I don't use Red Hat but when I update Debian Stable, my system doesn't
break, and I don't have to pay for 500 site licenses. My system benefits from
people that ensure emacs and libre office will work if I update glibc.

The same is not true for Windows, where XP obviously gets dropped with no sane
upgrade path and a non trivial cost.

~~~
jackvalentine
I don't want you to interpret what I'm going to say as talking down to you,
but it'll sound that way.

It's clear you've never worked in desktop support if you think that your
personal experiences upgrading your computer apply to any kind of wider
deployment.

There are issues training staff, maintaining a fleet of compatible hardware,
compatible software etc. This all costs money and will - two things Detroit
clearly didn't have. Making the software "free" may in some cases bring one
cost down, it may also inflate costs in the other parts of the equation.

I personally don't use Windows in my computers, but I have supported networks
that do and participated in a Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade project. You
have to hand it to Microsoft, if you stay within their support windows then
it's remarkable how well their upgrade path works. The money you pay them is
actually buying very polished system.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I think you're both right to some extent. Both approaches have difficulties,
just different ones.

The open source approach can have lower up-front costs (but isn't guaranteed
to have...), but it requires talent that's harder to find and more expensive
as a result. There's also the problem of user resistance, as you point out. We
have enough trouble just getting users to use FF/Chrome instead of IE; Linux
desktop systems wouldn't go over very well and would require a _ton_ of
effort. That's not even touching the problem of a lot of infrastructure being
irreversibly tied to software that expects to run in a Windows environment.

But the Microsoft stack can also incur a lot of up-front expenses for larger
organizations, and license management isn't very easy either. And, it has its
own issues and glitches.

Just to pull a number out of my butt, I'd guess a city like Detroit would be
looking at millions in Microsoft licensing costs alone if they were to upgrade
their entire infrastructure.

And XP->7 isn't usually too bad, but there are some recurring problems we've
encountered (Quickbooks), and XP->8 doesn't work at all.

~~~
jackvalentine
My point isn't that Windows is cheaper, or necessarily better, it's that its a
total fallacy to say this is a good "case for free software".

The problems that stopped detroits windows upgrade path would have absolutely
occurred with any other platform.

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marak830
Wow. That alarm system! Bonus points for an amazing hack!

------
TwoBit
Is it possible to have standardized city management software? It seems like
these cities always have hand written customized software systems.

~~~
mmanfrin
The one thought I have is that every city is guaranteed to have different laws
regarding its charter/governing contract. That might dictate a lot of how that
software interacts.

That being said, might be an area to make a killing having a highly-modular
City CMS you can sell for half the price of contracted software.

~~~
rtpg
The federal nature is a blessing and a curse, since though it's highly
variable, you can sell this to one city without getting the rest of the nation
to agree on it as well.

------
austenallred
> the database was created at a time when encryption wasn’t used.

Apparently I'm relatively new to technology, but when was this time when
"encryption wasn't used?" It seems so fundamental today that I can't imagine a
world without it.

~~~
cheepin
Back in the days where if you had a disk that implemented it, it was illegal
to take with you to another country (the vestiges of such laws are still
around today as a relic of that time).

------
tempodox
So here's the biggest disruption challenge of them all: make a city
functional. Sadly, that's more a political than a technological problem.

