City of Toronto: spinning freely

[James Knott]

Phillip Mills wrote:
> A day late, I've just read a Saturday Toronto Star article called, "MFP 
> computers obsolete."  (Page B3, GTA section)
> 
> It looks to me as if both the techs and the politicians are trying to soften 
> up the public so that they will swallow a 63 million dollar computer upgrade 
> of 1999 vintage systems.  There may be good business reasons for the upgrade, 
> but the technical ones they provide are baffling to me.

There's a perfectly logical reason:  There's some taxpayers money to be 
spent!
> 
> 1) "Toronto would like to adopt a 311 system where residents could punch in 
> that number and get information on city services or report problems.  That 
> would require major upgrades."
> 
> It might require new servers, but as an excuse for upgrading stuff that's 
> performing some current function, the reasoning doesn't cut it.
> 
> 2) "Deputy Mayor Sandra Bussin illustrated how out of date city hall's systems 
> are by pointing out that her office computer can't send a photo via e-mail."
> 
> OK, where do I start...?  I'm not a PC hardware expert, but my oldest Mac is 4 
> years older that her PC and it has no trouble sending a photo via 
> e-mail...guess it's a Wintel thing.  Semi-seriously, though, anyone here 
> think they could get poor Sandra's machine to send a photo via e-mail for 
> less than $63 million?

Well, I recently spent $80 on an Epson scanner, that included software 
that will e-mail a scanned image.  And for an even $30M, I'd be happy to 
teach her how to attach an existing image file to an e-mail.  I'd even 
bring coffee & donuts!  ;-)

> 


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