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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

#161

Post by Ancapistani »

nexuist wrote: post #115
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.

North Korea seems to have done it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

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

#162

Post by 3np »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #13
yabones wrote: post #7

> Currently the service uses both McAfee and Tanium software packages to scan and protect service-issued endpoints like laptops. The problem isn't hardware, it's that they're using the worst antivirus known to mankind. It's not throwing money at the problem, it's about what can be removed.

They should switch to Norton to make some crypto money on the side.

Wat?

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

#163

Post by praash »

omni wrote: post #117
praash wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, they're running Windows, and Windows is also software, contributing to the bloat. My point is that the resource overhead of just running an idle OS doesn't need to be humongous compared to the actual workload.

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

#164

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #59
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #15

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 pretty fun, to play as the medic class you actually had to sit in a first aid lecture with a test afterwords. I remember the lecture actually being really entertaining and educational.

omg this brought back so many memories!

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

#165

Post by pletsch »

projectileboy wrote: post #136
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…

One big problem is misaligned incentives. At most big orgs, you have an infosec dept with authority to put all kinds of virus scanning, etc etc on every computer in the org. They get rewarded if there are no incidents; they do not get penalized if they make your machine impossible to use.

Well designed security programs shouldn't slow down your PC. This is a failure on the infosec department. Sysmon/Windows logging can do most of the hardwork with very few resources.

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

#166

Post by Damogran6 »

imwillofficial wrote: post #129
Damogran6 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then Tanium needed tuning. There's no reason any of it's processing should have taken 1 core for more than 2 minutes...and that's the highest load task. Mostly it sits in the background, capped at 5% cpu. But there's only so much you can do with a 7th gen dual core mobile i7 Now...McAfee? a)Was a pig, but b)did we really need to scan the entire disk every Friday afternoon?

No tuning of Tanium will make it not garbage.

I shouldn't take that personally, but I manage Tanium and my experience doesn't mirror yours.

That said, I know they have some HUGE deployments in the Military and my piddly little 25000 client install may not be comparable.

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

#167

Post by joshstrange »

3np wrote: post #154
joshstrange wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me started on MDM and the like. It's a cancer for machines and causes all sorts of issues. I understand that some industries have certain compliance that either forces them to do this (or makes them think they need to) but I will not work in those industries. Send me a clean MBP and trust me to do my job. In fact, more and more I'd rather just a stipend and I'll buy my hardware. I've managed to effectively…

MDM?

Mobile device management, software that runs on your computer that talks back to a command/control-type server where your IT Dept can monitor the machine and push software/updates to your machine.

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

#168

Post by Ancapistani »

praash wrote: post #61
metabagel wrote: post #28

The military should evaluate wholesale replacement of spinning hard drives with SSD, rather than replacing many thousands of computers.

That won't solve the problem, unless you're assuming that it's perfectly normal for modern applications to use disk space as working memory.

s/normal/typical, and I’d say your statement is truthful.

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

#169

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #13
yabones wrote: post #7

> Currently the service uses both McAfee and Tanium software packages to scan and protect service-issued endpoints like laptops. The problem isn't hardware, it's that they're using the worst antivirus known to mankind. It's not throwing money at the problem, it's about what can be removed.

They should switch to Norton to make some crypto money on the side.

The Norton product that provides the services here is made and sold by a different company than the one shipping crypto-mining software.

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

#170

Post by gnu8 »

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…

> maxing out dev machines

This is how we get software catastrophes like Teams. There is no earthly reason for it to suffer from the bugs and performance issues that it does and I have to believe the developers responsible for it are completely unaware of how much this software sucks to use because of their hot rod developer workstations. They still dog food at Microsoft don’t they?

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