7 ms·

Before Detroit Can Move On, It Needs to Upgrade from Windows XP

marak830 12y ago
Wow. That alarm system! Bonus points for an amazing hack!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
visualR 12y ago
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.
- taf2 12y ago
  If there was good money to be had there IT would find it's way in. If the money dried up, it'll take a long time to fix things like this.
- Agathos 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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/winning-the-contract/ http://www1.learndirect-business.com/business-courses/winnin... 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 12y ago
      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.
  - dagw 12y ago
    Yea, I work quite a bit with government contracts, and to be honest it's a lot of fun and it offers some very interesting projects and R&D opportunities. But I work for mid sized consulting group that has at least two layers of insulation between me and the customer. My boss is an absolute hero for dealing with the stuff he deals with to make sure I just get to code. There is no way in hell I'd try to get involved in that world if I had to deal directly with the whole procurement process myself. Also I try to only take smaller projects (up to $100000 or so) since they tend to be handled by much more sane people all around.
- rtpg 12y ago
  I think a bigger issue is that it's (at least perceived to be) hard to deal with government for anything. Plus this is about physical infrastructure. I think many coder's fascination with train networks and the like would help fuel an interest in fixing Detroit IT, but those meatspace issues...
- thejosh 12y ago
  Wow that's generalising a lot, it's not like it's an IT sysadmin problem, it's a city problem. You're in a bubble if you think that.
- icelancer 12y ago
  And a subset of those problems are the insane RFPs and ridiculous red tape you go through when you design stuff for the government. Try it sometime. It's a blast.
na85 12y ago
Not sure a better case has been made for Free Software in government.
- jackvalentine 12y ago
  So they could be stuck on something like Red Hat 9 instead? The problem is only partially the licensing.
  - na85 12y ago
    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.
    - protomyth 12y ago
      The sane XP upgrade path was to Windows 7. Those that don't upgrade have larger problems in their IT then Microsoft or Windows.
    - jackvalentine 12y ago
      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.
austenallred 12y ago
> 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 12y ago
  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).
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  Mass adoption of encryption over the wire dates to the late 1980s for cell phone standards, and late 1990s for Internet communications. Of course, most Internet traffic to this day is still not encrypted, including email, which travels over the wire as plain text! Encryption at rest is harder to nail down; in my experience it has caught on quite a bit slower than over the wire. Until recently, it seems like most orgs believed that local network security meant they didn't have to encrypt data at rest.
- jzwinck 12y ago
  Here is an entire documentary from that time: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ - it's over five hours long. We used to use modems to connect directly to our friends (and sometimes, enemies), send and receive mail, play games, and lots more, all in the clear. This period of computer networking history lasted much longer than the one where encryption was used most of the time, so far.
- talmand 12y ago
  Back in the day when you needed physical access to the computer itself that was behind many locked doors and possibly guards because networking and the internet didn't exist, I could see not needing encryption. These days it's not that we need encryption, apparently we need stronger encryption and proper training for people who handle other people's data.
GabrielF00 12y ago
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.)
- michaelfeathers 12y ago
  Even more remarkable that the person who gave testimony on it is named Charles Moore. I'm assuming it isn't the Charles Moore who invented Forth - although that would be wild.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- upofadown 12y ago
  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).
TwoBit 12y ago
Is it possible to have standardized city management software? It seems like these cities always have hand written customized software systems.
- mmanfrin 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
- rmason 12y ago
  Here's a link to software that Code For America has open sourced: http://www.codeforamerica.org/apps/free.html#nav-tabs http://www.codeforamerica.org/apps/free.html#nav-tabs There's also some companies doing SAAS apps for cities. I hope Detroit jumps ahead of other cities in using the cloud. Maybe even replace some of those aging computers with Chromebooks.
ExpiredLink 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
- UnfalseDesign 12y ago
  Agreed. Though the article's title lists Windows XP as the city's major problem, it appears to be the least of its worries. The major bank I work for is just now standardizing everyone up to Windows 7. We've done the majority of our work in Office 2003. Though it is frustrating at times, it has not dragged us into bankruptcy. It sounds like upgrading to a modern operating system should be near the bottom of the list of things Detroit needs to do at the moment.
alexggordon 12y ago
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 12y ago
  > Detroit is in a position to because an incredibly techno-smart city. Unfortunately, you can't change the weather.
- unclesaamm 12y ago
  This is the gist of what their mayor's office has been saying, except they've placed more importance on renewable energy and sustainability. Detroit, lacking everything, is also in a good place to compete to be the greenest.
debacle 12y ago
> 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 12y ago
  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.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jbooth 12y ago
    I guarantee you that whatever mistakes the city government in Detroit made, above and on top of socio-economic things that are hard for them to control, nobody ever said "I know, we'll create a socialist mini-state in detroit and that will fix things". That definitely didn't happen.
    - valarauca1 12y ago
      > indirectly adverb 1. In a way that is not directly caused by something; incidentally. 2. Without having had direct experience They didn't mean to do it, but ultimately that is what happened.
tempodox 12y ago
So here's the biggest disruption challenge of them all: make a city functional. Sadly, that's more a political than a technological problem.

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

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

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.

taf2 12y ago
If there was good money to be had there IT would find it's way in. If the money dried up, it'll take a long time to fix things like this.
Agathos 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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/winning-the-contract/ http://www1.learndirect-business.com/business-courses/winnin... 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 12y ago
    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.
- dagw 12y ago
  Yea, I work quite a bit with government contracts, and to be honest it's a lot of fun and it offers some very interesting projects and R&D opportunities. But I work for mid sized consulting group that has at least two layers of insulation between me and the customer. My boss is an absolute hero for dealing with the stuff he deals with to make sure I just get to code. There is no way in hell I'd try to get involved in that world if I had to deal directly with the whole procurement process myself. Also I try to only take smaller projects (up to $100000 or so) since they tend to be handled by much more sane people all around.
rtpg 12y ago
I think a bigger issue is that it's (at least perceived to be) hard to deal with government for anything. Plus this is about physical infrastructure. I think many coder's fascination with train networks and the like would help fuel an interest in fixing Detroit IT, but those meatspace issues...
thejosh 12y ago
Wow that's generalising a lot, it's not like it's an IT sysadmin problem, it's a city problem. You're in a bubble if you think that.
icelancer 12y ago
And a subset of those problems are the insane RFPs and ridiculous red tape you go through when you design stuff for the government. Try it sometime. It's a blast.

na85 12y ago

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

jackvalentine 12y ago
So they could be stuck on something like Red Hat 9 instead? The problem is only partially the licensing.
- na85 12y ago
  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.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    The sane XP upgrade path was to Windows 7. Those that don't upgrade have larger problems in their IT then Microsoft or Windows.
  - jackvalentine 12y ago
    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.

austenallred 12y ago

> 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 12y ago
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).
snowwrestler 12y ago
Mass adoption of encryption over the wire dates to the late 1980s for cell phone standards, and late 1990s for Internet communications. Of course, most Internet traffic to this day is still not encrypted, including email, which travels over the wire as plain text! Encryption at rest is harder to nail down; in my experience it has caught on quite a bit slower than over the wire. Until recently, it seems like most orgs believed that local network security meant they didn't have to encrypt data at rest.
jzwinck 12y ago
Here is an entire documentary from that time: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ - it's over five hours long. We used to use modems to connect directly to our friends (and sometimes, enemies), send and receive mail, play games, and lots more, all in the clear. This period of computer networking history lasted much longer than the one where encryption was used most of the time, so far.
talmand 12y ago
Back in the day when you needed physical access to the computer itself that was behind many locked doors and possibly guards because networking and the internet didn't exist, I could see not needing encryption. These days it's not that we need encryption, apparently we need stronger encryption and proper training for people who handle other people's data.

GabrielF00 12y ago

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.)

michaelfeathers 12y ago
Even more remarkable that the person who gave testimony on it is named Charles Moore. I'm assuming it isn't the Charles Moore who invented Forth - although that would be wild.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
upofadown 12y ago
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).

TwoBit 12y ago

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

mmanfrin 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
rmason 12y ago
Here's a link to software that Code For America has open sourced: http://www.codeforamerica.org/apps/free.html#nav-tabs http://www.codeforamerica.org/apps/free.html#nav-tabs There's also some companies doing SAAS apps for cities. I hope Detroit jumps ahead of other cities in using the cloud. Maybe even replace some of those aging computers with Chromebooks.

ExpiredLink 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.
UnfalseDesign 12y ago
Agreed. Though the article's title lists Windows XP as the city's major problem, it appears to be the least of its worries. The major bank I work for is just now standardizing everyone up to Windows 7. We've done the majority of our work in Office 2003. Though it is frustrating at times, it has not dragged us into bankruptcy. It sounds like upgrading to a modern operating system should be near the bottom of the list of things Detroit needs to do at the moment.

alexggordon 12y ago

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 12y ago
> Detroit is in a position to because an incredibly techno-smart city. Unfortunately, you can't change the weather.
unclesaamm 12y ago
This is the gist of what their mayor's office has been saying, except they've placed more importance on renewable energy and sustainability. Detroit, lacking everything, is also in a good place to compete to be the greenest.

debacle 12y ago

> 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 12y ago
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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jbooth 12y ago
  I guarantee you that whatever mistakes the city government in Detroit made, above and on top of socio-economic things that are hard for them to control, nobody ever said "I know, we'll create a socialist mini-state in detroit and that will fix things". That definitely didn't happen.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    > indirectly adverb 1. In a way that is not directly caused by something; incidentally. 2. Without having had direct experience They didn't mean to do it, but ultimately that is what happened.

tempodox 12y ago

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