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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

#31

Post by metabagel »

AlexandrB wrote: post #24
codyb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively. The USAF are a bargain for a more stable world with less regional conflicts. While the Middle East is a disaster, and there are many easy to point out missteps on its record that truly are awful and horrific. It's also currently the world's pre-eminent power in a history dominated by strong militaries and during its tenure as such the world has unequivocally been more stable and peaceful than it's ever…

I think that's a very rosy view of US intervention. In particular, the US has helped overthrow numerous democratic governments because they were not ideologically aligned with the kind of free trade maximalism the US favours. Indonesia and Chile are particularly notable examples here. It's unclear if US actions have created a more stable world, but they have certainly created one more aligned with the US ideologicall…

Wasn’t the military which overthrew democratic governments though. It was the CIA.

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

#32

Post by ceedan »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #15
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #3

Not 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.

That game was really solid

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

#33

Post by gnramires »

codyb wrote: post #6
noahth wrote: post #4

Quoted post unavailable.

Alternatively. The USAF are a bargain for a more stable world with less regional conflicts. While the Middle East is a disaster, and there are many easy to point out missteps on its record that truly are awful and horrific. It's also currently the world's pre-eminent power in a history dominated by strong militaries and during its tenure as such the world has unequivocally been more stable and peaceful than it's ever…

I would support a more pro-active humanistic military, but many humanitarian causes have been left to the United Nations. The US knows its legitimacy (as well as political support) will come into question in those scenarios. How about we strengthen UN instead?

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

#34

Post by codyb »

AlexandrB wrote: post #24
codyb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively. The USAF are a bargain for a more stable world with less regional conflicts. While the Middle East is a disaster, and there are many easy to point out missteps on its record that truly are awful and horrific. It's also currently the world's pre-eminent power in a history dominated by strong militaries and during its tenure as such the world has unequivocally been more stable and peaceful than it's ever…

I think that's a very rosy view of US intervention. In particular, the US has helped overthrow numerous democratic governments because they were not ideologically aligned with the kind of free trade maximalism the US favours. Indonesia and Chile are particularly notable examples here. It's unclear if US actions have created a more stable world, but they have certainly created one more aligned with the US ideologicall…

Yea, I generally am a bigger fan of what the US does just by being there than I am of our actual interventions in places which can frequently be seen as short sighted, bloody, and against our own principles at times.

But from a world composed of far more people that those in Chile, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, and South America. I think we've done a decent job overall from a historical perspective of promoting a fairly stable world during Pax Americana. With quite a few missteps along the way.

My point isn't that it's perfect, my point is that... all things considered, for a really large amount of the world's population, things aren't _that bad_ given historical context.

Sure, the child laboring to make phones in China isn't going to wax poetic about the wonders of Pax Americana. But my point is more... child labor was only more frequent in histories past.

Sure the murdered wedding goers in Afghanistan won't be happy about the state of affairs but civilians dying erroneously during combat operations has been a near constant in world history and at this point you're less likely to die in that manner than ever before.

You could argue that it's a result of larger populations but I'm not certain about that given Kazakhstan; Syria; China in Xianjiang, Hong Kong, the S China Sea, and Taiwan; Russia in Georgia, Crimea, and the rest of Ukraine; Myanmar; basically the entire Middle East.

It's easy to talk about how bad the USAF is, they've done a lot of bad shit over the years, my impression is it's still better than the alternative.

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

#35

Post by curi0sity »

zbrozek wrote: post #20
alistairSH wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that we over-fund out military, probably by an order of magnitude, I still want our military to be functional. And that requires good IT. The two goals should not be mutually exclusive.

IT departments in large organizations often see their users as adversaries rather than customers. The department's goal isn't to enable productivity but to prevent computing. This is probably WAI.

Sounds like somebody thinks they need root access to the production servers.

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

#36

Post by the_only_law »

easton wrote: post #30
iamben wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

I worked at a internship one time where by the end of the two month stint my machine would take upwards of 45 minutes to login because there was something that was running on login that had to timeout (because it was broken). Sometimes IT pushes policies that conflict with other stuff and rarely do they check every configuration (or setup alerting for these bad cases). There's lots of reasons it can happen though (es…

> Couple that with all the security crap the DoD has to put on there (which probably spends half its time trying to grab resources from the other security software)

Corporate spyware is a huge impact to performance, particularly if you have an HDD. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen a computer start to lock up because some security software needs to absolutely abuse the disk.

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

#37

Post by mschuster91 »

> 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.

And that's the point where IT should go, run a filter in the inventory list for all models < 2018 and have local IT service desks replace them. If you know your users are of the type to not cause any trouble with IT due to culture, you go the other way around to bypass that culture.

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

#38

Post by omni »

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.

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.

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

#39

Post by codyb »

gnramires wrote: post #33
codyb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively. The USAF are a bargain for a more stable world with less regional conflicts. While the Middle East is a disaster, and there are many easy to point out missteps on its record that truly are awful and horrific. It's also currently the world's pre-eminent power in a history dominated by strong militaries and during its tenure as such the world has unequivocally been more stable and peaceful than it's ever…

I would support a more pro-active humanistic military, but many humanitarian causes have been left to the United Nations. The US knows its legitimacy (as well as political support) will come into question in those scenarios. How about we strengthen UN instead?

I'm certainly very pro working cooperatively with other Democratic nations to secure a more just and peaceful future less dominated by a singe nation state.

The problem is, alliances fray (Turkey, Belarus, Britain, the United States... we've all had our issues with current alliances and treaties in recent history alone). And that gets problematic and very hairy.

The other issue is, a single state dominance is prone to being coopted by less than benign actors and we've certainly seen that in the US I believe, especially given our invasion of Iraq.

So there's no cure alls on these things unfortunately. As a general practice I believe brining more members under our umbrella and strengthening the organizations like NATO and the UN which can act as a cooperative unit and not as a unilateral actor is a positive.

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

#40

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

omni wrote: post #38
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.

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.

Ha, you're blaming hardware yet the likely reason that those systems are slow isn't because the hardware can't do things quickly, but because the modern software they run on it is bloated and slow.
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