It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools

Like I didn't see this coming -- from The Hill:

White House budget director blames old computers for ineffective government
A big reason why the government is inefficient and ineffective is because Washington has outdated technology, with federal workers having better computers at home than in the office.

This startling admission came Thursday from Peter Orszag, who manages the federal bureaucracy for President Barack Obama.
The public is getting a bad return on its tax dollars because government workers are operating with outdated technologies, Orszag said in a statement that kicked off a summit between Obama and dozens of corporate CEOs.

�Twenty years ago, people who came to work in the federal government had better technology at work than at home,� said Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. �Now that�s no longer the case.

�The American people deserve better service from their government, and better return for their tax dollars.�

Geezzz -- I spent last Fall doing a technology refresh around the house. Jen's old 'puter was seven years old, my system was eight. Both were working fine (each with four MB RAM which goes a long way to improve performance in older systems), they were just slow with the newer applications. They were both 1.2GHz Pentium systems. The key thing is that there was nothing about these systems that prevented us from doing our work, they were just slow. When I get back, I will be putting Puppy Linux onto them and finding good homes for them as they work great for basic email and office systems. The idea that using an older computer system is causing our government to be inefficient is a bald-faced lie of the worst order. If this Peter Orszag person actually believes this bullshit, he needs to have his ass fired A.S.A.P. And yeah, I got a couple awesome DELL desktops for about $800 each -- six GB RAM, 400 GB hard disk and 2.8GHz quad-core CPUs. Integrated graphics so for the basic office machines, that is fine. For the one system I am using for photo and video editing, I spent another $120 for a decent graphics card which freed up more RAM bringing that machine up to eight GB.