1. I used to consider the size of Windows a problem, then it occurred to me that I no longer play video games, and my video sources are all streaming. My 1TB hard drive has 800 GB free. Government employees outside of media offices and labs/shops that are heavily dependent on large data sets or large resource files like CAD or GIS data are probably not facing a data crunch on their user workstations with the current cost of hard drives.
2. Didn't like my response to this, may edit later.
3. Now this is reasonable, software installation on Windows sucks by default. However, there are some good tools out there for handling the distribution of software. I recall using some when I worked in IT at a university. Ghost had a way to do it that was essentially taking a snapshot, installing, then another snapshot. The difference was what got installed onto the rest of the computers. There was also a piece of software we used that let us handle on-demand software installation for things with limited keys (like Matlab), I don't remember (a decade ago now) what this one was. Not baked in, but it was more than serviceable as I recall.
4. IRS probably still has a fair number of mainframes. If they're like other federal agencies they'll have a mixture of Solaris, Windows and Linux servers installed depending on the contract at the time the information system was put together. Again, that modularity would be nice, but it's hardly practical unless the fed establishes one organization to be responsible for making, supporting and distributing this OS. Then you'd get a bunch of folks on the right bitching about government interfering with business, and people on both sides bitching about the security/privacy implications.
2. Didn't like my response to this, may edit later.
3. Now this is reasonable, software installation on Windows sucks by default. However, there are some good tools out there for handling the distribution of software. I recall using some when I worked in IT at a university. Ghost had a way to do it that was essentially taking a snapshot, installing, then another snapshot. The difference was what got installed onto the rest of the computers. There was also a piece of software we used that let us handle on-demand software installation for things with limited keys (like Matlab), I don't remember (a decade ago now) what this one was. Not baked in, but it was more than serviceable as I recall.
4. IRS probably still has a fair number of mainframes. If they're like other federal agencies they'll have a mixture of Solaris, Windows and Linux servers installed depending on the contract at the time the information system was put together. Again, that modularity would be nice, but it's hardly practical unless the fed establishes one organization to be responsible for making, supporting and distributing this OS. Then you'd get a bunch of folks on the right bitching about government interfering with business, and people on both sides bitching about the security/privacy implications.