Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US army has sponsored development of games quite a lot; I remember a friend of mine who was really into America's Army, that must've been 15 years ago now.
That game was really solid
Played it as well. Good stuff.
‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds
91–100 of 264 posts
Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds
#92I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…
I've heard an alternative, proposed often at Google: give devs the weakest systems possible: slow flaky net, slow machines with minimal memory so they are forced to make efficient systems for people in third world countries (key to rapid growth for many products).
Personally I don't care much about my laptop except htat it can drive a large external display and does fast networking. I only use it to connect to a VM I make in teh cloud, which is multiples faster and more powerful than my macbook pro.
Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds
#93The military has the most interesting issues with tech. My brother asked me for help getting to a website to work at one point. If I recall correctly there was a slew of issues, for one, the certificate on their Exchange server was expired, but more frustratingly, the site he needed to access seemed to use some sort of TLS version or feature that didn’t work in IE. That’d be fine and all, as they worked in other brow…
Probably mutual TLS. There is a whole completely unofficial website that just walks people through debugging issues with CAC authentication…
Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds
#94I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…
They don't buy a laptop but a seat for some amount of years. So they're guaranteed X amount of laptops for Y years.
The selling company is obviously going to min/max this contract as much as they can. You could order a bunch of laptops if you had the authority I guess, but it will not be making on to the network since that is under contract too (probably the same company)
Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds
#95> Knausenberger called this “a cultural issue … We need people to call the help desk to complain and order a new laptop when it breaks.” She said a service culture of stoically persevering in the face of impossible odds didn’t do anyone any favors. “If we suffer in silence it doesn’t get fixed,” she said. Apparently all you need to do is call IT and get a new computer! I wonder why none of these service men and women…
You get 90min for coffee time :)
Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds
#96Not to be missed in the article: The Air Force has a "chief of esports and virtual fitness"
The US army has sponsored development of games quite a lot; I remember a friend of mine who was really into America's Army, that must've been 15 years ago now.
Wow that game hasnt come up for quite a while - Blast from the past!
Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds
#97I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…
Part of this is that IT is viewed as a cost center (well, because it is), and often "owns" the expense of issuing laptops. IT's objective is to ship you a laptop that will adequately run the software you need to perform your job duties. How efficiently you perform them becomes a problem for you and your manager.
I understand the basic reasons why but anyone who actually examines this has to come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to issue sub-par tech is penny wise and pound foolish. Heck, for developer satisfaction alone I think it's good idea to upgrade them yearly or every 2 years at most. Cycle those machines through your org or resell them. The depreciation lost in resale is tiny compared to increased efficiency and how happy your devs are.
Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is definitely hardware. If you actually read the linked sources, it sounds like the Air Force bought a ton of spinning rust HDD machines in 2018 for the lowest possible price they could. They probably only have 4GB of RAM too, then, given what low end specs were like at the time. Good luck getting anything done today with those specs.
That's not actually such "low end spec" that would cause logins and mails to take an hour to process. To me, the whole ordeal screams: software bloat, software misconfiguration, background service overload. You could snappily send mail 15 years ago, and the computational task itself hasn't grown much, besides bloated browser login windows. Try booting a 2 GB RAM machine to some RAM-preloading Linux thumbdrive and you…
Have you tried using Windows 10/11 with on-access and behavioral AV (not defender) on 4gb of RAM and a 5400rpm spinning disk? I find it entirely plausible that they have to wait an hour plus for the machine to become remotely responsive.
Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds
#99> Knausenberger said the ACC team would “streamline [existing programs] into one endpoint solution that meets our security, operations, and UX needs.” I've read sci-fi books that are more realistic than this. Only the wildest cyber-crime novels portray the military network systems and administration ops as competent. When watching "Alias" a long time ago, I had to laugh every time I saw an instantly responding laptop…
> Knausenberger said the ACC team would “streamline [existing programs] into one endpoint solution that meets our security, operations, and UX needs.”
Sounds like they're going to get the F-35 of antivirus software. Having multiple programs might not be the problem, but consolidating to just one is an easy sell for a lucrative non-solution.
Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds
#100I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…
It doesn't even have to be low end hardware. I just gave back a laptop to a client that I was working with in healthcare. It's a 16" MBP with an i7 and 32GB of RAM. The machine itself is really fast but gets bogged down by all the other crap it has to connect to. They had McAfee endpoint security on these things and it would prevent any unauthorized apps from running as well as hog between 50-70% of the CPU during it's daily "checks" (which ran every hour). I eventually had to patch a kernel ktext just to get the endpoint to shut up and stop eating my memory.
The problem isn't hardware necessarily (well it is here), but it's also the bundled software. Not only are these machines old but they are having to load all this extra shit that slows down the whole experience that much more.