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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

#181

Post by willcipriano »

dsr_ wrote: post #176

It's not the hardware, it's the crap that runs on it. You want a system which is secure and usable? Time for the DoD to commission their own OS. "Nobody will know how to use it!" is an objection which can be overcome by training, which is a thing that the armed forces understand. "It won't be compatible with the COTS!" is an advantage, not a disadvantage. "It will take too long and cost too much!" means that they are…

> commission their own OS.

I'd advise they start with a Linux distro. They can audit/replace components as they go to increase security over time. Even North Korea wasn't paranoid to build it's own OS[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

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

#182

Post by joshstrange »

gnu8 wrote: post #170
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?

Failing to test on lower-end hardware or refusing to optimize is not the result of giving devs good computers, it's management that doesn't care. Doesn't care to test on lower end, doesn't care about how much ram/cpu, doesn't care how laggy it is. Even if a developer wanted to do this work good luck getting management to sign off on it, I've seen this happen myself more times than I can count.

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

#183

Post by gcanyon »

treis wrote: post #105
_fat_santa wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's astounding the amount of CPU that things use doing nothing. Zoom takes constant 4% CPU usage to show a login screen and Slack does 20% doing nothing. Turning off gifs for Slack drops that back down to ~5%. But still 5% for a chat app at idle.

The thing I wonder is why apple doesn’t fix this.

To be clear, it’s not apple’s fault —- but they do own the OS and the scheduler.

I’ve previously experimented with the kill command, stopping and starting applications. Apple could do this automatically and reduce that 5% to 1%, or even 0.1%.

This assumes that Slack is doing something over and over many times, rather that just being super-slow at doing the thing once.

Slack is a chat app, and as you say has no business requiring 5% of a CPU. If it’s doing that because it checks for new messages more often than once per second, Apple can help them with that. If they actually require more than a second to check for messages, then their requirements or their developers need to change.

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

#184

Post by dekhn »

ferrumfist wrote: post #146
dekhn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here's the argument that Brad Fitzpatrick (who espoused this idea) gave: at the time, he was creating livejournal and had a bunch of russian hackers building the site. He noticed that every time they made pages load faster or work better, more people used the site (and site growth is the simple most important metric), and that more and more people were coming from countries with poor internet infra. So, he made his w…

A better approach is to simply buy your devs 2 computers: 1 fast PC for speedy development and 1 slow laptop for testing. It makes no sense to give developers a slower computer simply to make them develop better. It's like saying that post office workers must now use bicycles instead of motor vehicles in order to encourage them to find shortcuts. I'm not a successful CEO, though, so maybe I'm just talking out my ass.

yes, as the chromeos person mentioned upthread, you have a dev infra that is fat, and a user testing environment that represents the user experience. Devs don't need to hobble their machines. I argued with Brad about this many times...

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

#185

Post by 908B64B197 »

spamizbad wrote: post #86
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…

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.

> well, because it is

Is it? Without IT can a business even run?

> and often "owns" the expense of issuing laptops.

That's just accounting done wrong. The correct way to do accounting around internal IT is to have IT bill projects/departments for their use.

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

#186

Post by nucleardog »

3np wrote: post #162
iforgotpassword wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wat?

Few articles floating around from about a month ago, this is one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29795910

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

#187

Post by projectileboy »

ninju wrote: post #157
projectileboy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they do not get penalized if they make your machine impossible to use. An "impossible to use" machine won't have any incidents reported against it

Exactly.

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

#188

Post by jasonjayr »

dsr_ wrote: post #176

It's not the hardware, it's the crap that runs on it. You want a system which is secure and usable? Time for the DoD to commission their own OS. "Nobody will know how to use it!" is an objection which can be overcome by training, which is a thing that the armed forces understand. "It won't be compatible with the COTS!" is an advantage, not a disadvantage. "It will take too long and cost too much!" means that they are…

Linux + wireguard-only network interfaces? With physically secured, uncloneable memory cards for each device's/interface's private key?

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

#189

Post by wyager »

dsr_ wrote: post #176

It's not the hardware, it's the crap that runs on it. You want a system which is secure and usable? Time for the DoD to commission their own OS. "Nobody will know how to use it!" is an objection which can be overcome by training, which is a thing that the armed forces understand. "It won't be compatible with the COTS!" is an advantage, not a disadvantage. "It will take too long and cost too much!" means that they are…

> lots of jobs will be created

Invoking the broken window fallacy is not a good sign for the coherence of your argument.

I'm not entirely sure whether I should interpret this post literally or as a satire of NIH syndrome.

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

#190

Post by hn_version_0023 »

ngc248 wrote: post #110
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.

Oh man ... the cruft that corporate IT installs slows down the computers so much. Its better if companies start handing out linux machines if they cant afford macs. I would trade my windows laptop with IT cruft any day for a linux machine.

IT will cruft it up no matter the OS. I’ve had to run TrendMicro on AWS linux instances because of the gov’ts settlement with Sony re: “North Korean hacking”.

It destroyed performance. Also it was poorly configured by the checkmark-brigade in their “security & compliance” department.

All I’m saying is careful what you wish for.

Edit: spelling

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