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‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

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Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#111

Post by cjbgkagh »

joshstrange wrote: post #72

I 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 worked at a company where all software was designed around a 1024x768 resolution. They decided to upgrade from CRTs to LCDs. I strongly suggested they buy the 17” LCDs of the same native resolution, instead they saved a few hundred dollars per person by choosing the smaller 15” 800x600 LCDs. Users either had to deal with a headache inducing blurriness of non native resolution or spend half their days scrolling their screen up and down and left to right. These people were used to keyboard only interactions and now had to keep one hand on the mouse. It was maddening. Half of their staff ~50 people quit over just that one thing.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#112

Post by stavros »

praash wrote: post #51
omni wrote: post #38

Earlier 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…

Why wouldn't it? That's how long it takes to swap memory on an HDD, it doesn't surprise me, especially with how many resources today's browsers and sites consume.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#113

Post by Moto7451 »

joshstrange wrote: post #72

I 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…

Sometimes companies spend extra to slow their employees down. We hired a dev team to develop a custom dev environment that takes twenty minutes to stand up. Our old off the shelf tech took about thirty seconds but lacked all the buzzwords of today.

VMs and plain Docker containers are for suckers apparently. We went from one not like prod environment to another, but at least this one costs us a few millions in salary per year to create. Someone is getting a promotion, right?

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#114

Post by cormacrelf »

joshstrange wrote: post #101
dekhn wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And let's tie one hand behind their backs and cover one eye as well while we are at it. I think the idea of giving devs trash hardware because "it's what our users use" is the worst solution possible to solving that problem. Have the devs or another team test on lower-end hardware before pushing a version, don't hobble them while they are creating.

Well, that would help with making technology more accessible.

Developers, especially highly paid ones, are as selfish as anyone else on the planet. If you have a strategy to make them care about literally a single other person, I suggest you go for it.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#115

Post by nexuist »

johnklos wrote: post #71

Why aren't aircraft made as simple to fly as cars are to drive? Why aren't regular people allowed to just get in an aircraft and start flying after a couple of hours of practice? We see no problem in assuming that people need the lowest-common-denominator operating system in computer to suit the people instead of the people learning how to use a proper computer, though. If something is mission critical, then it shoul…

Yes, let's put the incompetent buffoons who thought installing McAfee on every government computer was a good idea in charge of their rolling own Linux distro. That sure would solve all of these problems.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#116

Post by stadium »

taurath wrote: post #104

Loving that the solution from the CIO of the air force isn’t “we’re going to move our resources into this problem” but “we’re going to ask for more funding so we can tackle this”. Which seems just stupid in its face, but then you realize that almost all of the budgeting is line itemed for specific capabilities. If leadership can’t change resources around to fix such a glaring problem due to legal/budgeting rules, the…

Wouldn't any competent CIO of a company or government office big enough to need a CIO do the same? Which roadmapped strategic projects are going to get chopped so that this new project can start immediately?

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#117

Post by omni »

praash wrote: post #51
omni wrote: post #38

Earlier 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…

> Try booting a 2 GB RAM machine to some RAM-preloading Linux thumbdrive and you'll see why the problem is not "spinning rust HDDs" and "only 4 GB RAM"

They're absolutely running some sort of modern Windows so I don't see how this is relevant at all. MS-DOS2.0 would also work like a dream on those specs, who cares?

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#118

Post by somehnguy »

_fat_santa wrote: post #100
joshstrange wrote: post #72

I 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…

At my current position I've been using the same 2015 MBP since...2015. As time goes on corporate keeps deciding more security issues exist and they keep shoveling on the 'security' software. So not only is my hardware aging - they're making it worse by artificially slowing it down.

The last agent they installed had a nasty habit of pegging the CPU at 100% and locking up virtual machines for 10-15s at a time anytime there was heavy disk activity. Luckily I still have root on the local machine so I wrote a quick script to loop and kill that process whenever it spawned. I'm not bragging about that, but it is what it is I guess.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#119

Post by alexpotato »

“It has been the absolute most frustrating thing in the world since the [Department of the Air Force] … made OWA crazy locked down,” said Oliver Parsons, chief of esports and virtual fitness for the Department of the Air Force

The above made me stop and ask "The Air Force has an esports group??"

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#120

Post by nexuist »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #53
mysterydip wrote: post #21

The crux of the issue is in these four words: "lowest price technically acceptable." In the name of saving money, good intentions cause more waste in time and money.

I disagree. I think the crux of the issue is that modern computing is garbage. https://www.google.com/search?q=frustrating My, a lot of those images involve computers for some reason...

The defense budget is over $700 billion. They should just buy or build two million Chromebooks and be done with it. Any native apps can be converted to SaaSs that run on nationally managed DoD infrastructure and everyone can do their jobs without needing to deal with this security BS.
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