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The New York Police Department's Deputy Commissioner of IT has defended the department's purchase of $160 million worth of obsolete Windows phones after a New York Post article criticized the "boondoggle". The NYPD plans to switch to iPhones:
On Monday, Jessica Tisch, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of information technology, wrote a scathing defense of the NYPD's choice of Windows phone.
The two-year project wrapped up in October and cost $160 million. It put Windows phones into the hands of all 36,000 officers.
The NY Post's Tina Moore originally reported on the change with the headline: NYPD needs to replace 36K useless smartphones. In the article Moore points out:
"Just months after the last phone was handed out, officials plan to begin replacing them all with brand-new iPhones by the end of the year, sources said."
This clearly didn't sit well with Tisch. She penned a retort that extolled the virtues of the Windows smartphone program, while also confirming that the NYPD has given up on Windows in favor of iPhones.
The smartphones purchased were the Lumia 830 and Lumia 640 XL.
Blog post defending the use of Windows phones. Also at New York Magazine, The Register, and Mac Rumors.
Older article about the "crime-fighting phone".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zappy on Wednesday August 30 2017, @05:06PM (7 children)
over $4k per phone
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday August 30 2017, @05:10PM (3 children)
Let's include some spares.
$4k per phone at 40,000 phones.
$2k per phone at 80,000 phones, more than 2 per officer.
Yeah, they got hosed. I guess a chunk of that $160m went to developing those slick apps they can't live without.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 30 2017, @05:34PM (2 children)
Comes out as 2.22222k per year for me.
While expensive, 2 grand per officer per year seems pretty small on the whole, compared to gas, logistics, wrongful death suits, etc. Especially if the software licensing fees are part of that 160 million.
Having said that: Migrating devices every 2 years is fucking stupid. Anything the police, firefighters, military, etc is using should have at least a 5 year lifetime, with options for units to upgrade or retain on a case by case basis. Some of the device refreshes will make sense. Some will be duds. Arbitrarily pushing the whole force onto a new device every few years seems like a horribly bad idea in and of itself. Nevermind the increased dangers of efficient and ubiquitous hacking with a monoculture.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 30 2017, @09:30PM
Does that include the cost of service?
50 dollars a month, 24 months = 1.2k + $800 dollars phone and we are right where they spent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:45AM
Over $2000/phone isn't hard to do if you are spending money someone else is obliged to pay.
Its easy to be generous if someone else is on the hook for the tab, along with being held harmless for irresponsible decisions.
This is to me just a strong indication that way too much tax monies are being collected and rerouted through handshakers.
The monoculture part is scary. Imagine the power of being able to shut down the entire police force communication just as easy as bricking a bunch of locks. I think the people who are implementing this are in dire need of a review to see if their intelligence and wisdom warrant the authority given to them.
To me, this is just as scary as our monoculture corn... and here NK is toying with nuclear weapons... One good monoculture corn blight and we will go into civil riots over food shortages, and do lots more damage than missiles ever could, while leaving the land open for new ownership.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday August 30 2017, @06:23PM (1 child)
As it turns out, Tisch [nypdconfidential.com] is probably not the best person for the job and a bit of digging might show just how much so. It was fully her project [macdailynews.com]. She and her supervisor need to be called out on that.
It's not like people couldn't see long in advance that M$ phones weren't worth shit, so something is very wrong there. M$ phones peaked at around only 2% of shipped phones. Market share never hit even that high. Apparently many that were shipped were never activated, probably just binned. The number I recall for that was about two thirds. Anyway, now they're down to less than a fraction of a percent [blogs.com] because while Android is 81% and iOS is 18%, the other category includes Sailfish, Tizen, and several others, not just the defunct M$ phone. However, if you never checked the numbers and only read what the shills promoting it for years wrote, you'd be excused for believing that it was double digits. But purchasing at that level can't be excused for not having the facts. It looks like you have there a M$ fifth columnist using tax money to promote an agenda and ideology, function be damned.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 30 2017, @09:09PM
M$ phones [are] down to less than a fraction of a percent [marketshare]
Upthread, takyon has mentioned the apps.
Doesn't it make good sense to specify that apps be written using cross-platform tools such as Qt, [wikipedia.org] so that it doesn't much matter what hardware/OS gets used?
...or make it where those will run in any standards-compliant browser?
How this chick (who does things like it's still 1999) got to be in a top tech position is a complete mystery to me.
El Reg mentioned a few things: [theregister.co.uk]
Here's a gem from that:
[1] If that's the same Loews that I'm thinking of, they've been a Linux user for a long time. [google.com]
Within the first 10 hits, there's something dated 2008.
...and I'm thinking that it goes back further than that.
...and I really like El Reg's alliterative subtitle:
Bonkers buy-up by bungling billionairess.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday August 31 2017, @06:48PM
$73.95 on Ebay! Drain the swamp!