I know NAVAIR is a favorite whipping boy around here but supplying the fleet with NMCI machines isn't in our swimlane. NAVAIR still pays NMCI for the machines which is apparently something the fleet hasn't quite figured out how to properly resource. I haven't worked in a squadron in 5+yrs but I doubt it's improved since then which is frankly BS.
-
Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?
Go here:
Edit Account Details and Profile
Taxpayer wasted money: NMCI Windows 10 update
- Thread starter MIDNJAC
- Start date
Is there an echo in here? And you want to be my latex salesman?
Nobody has the ability to do any of these things.
Not shooting the messenger here, just the message.
This is like the Navy buying a car that worked pretty well when it was new, but now that we've had it for a year and a lot of different people have driven it you can't drive until 30 minutes after you start the engine.
Thousands and thousands of the Navy's cars have the same issue.
We just shrug it off and nobody does anything about it- nobody with stars on their collar solves the problem.
The bloatware/resource hog thing isn't entirely the Navy's fault, that's just the nature of the computer industry, but the Navy deserves a lot of the blame for going along with it.
Again with the car analogy, that 140hp Ford Taurus isn't good enough anymore. You probably use this new car for the same things you always did- email, spreadsheets and powerpoint, but the latest software is optimized for 143,360hp. Much less than that and a year from now you'll hate this car even more. It's not that the new software is any better, it's that the hardware is better so the programmers got lazy, they added a bunch of stuff nobody really needs, and we can't take it out. So "optimized" isn't the most accurate word but the budget people don't like it when we call it "shitty."
ONI has a Hopper IT service desk that will re-image your machine with a fresh NMCI image or perform other support if you put in a ticket. I’ve used it.
In regards to the auto CAC lockout...the first thing we do when we log into our NIPR and SIPR computers is run a windows preloaded video file, usually in the public folder, and set it to repeat. That way the computer never auto locks.
And yeah, once S/MIME dies, it'll lead to a world of hurt for those orgs that still don't have access to outlook for some dumb reason and rely solely on OWA.
And yeah, once S/MIME dies, it'll lead to a world of hurt for those orgs that still don't have access to outlook for some dumb reason and rely solely on OWA.
I’m pretty sure that is a significant security violation on the SIPR side.
None of us work at ONI.
This is a relieving perspective for somebody who has identified these computers as the strongest point in my "Leave the Navy" column. That should be a ridiculous statement, but so much time is wasted just waiting for the opportunity to BEGIN doing my job. I am TRYING to earn my excessive paycheck here, folks...
Your paperwork shouldn't take half as long as your flight just because you can't make the tech work. Windows Explorer shouldn't routinely crash. Logins shouldn't take 10-15 minutes to reach a stable operating state (can't walk away from your CAC/token, either...)
This is an absolutely absurd funding oversight, and my immature view on it is that people who run these decisions are simply too old or too high up in the chain to be affected by this daily efficiency drain.
Rant over, back to following Jim Carey's lead.
I agree. Good on NAVAIR for resourcing themselves that way. But could some of that money be used to fund the operational side more, with the cost being not every GS and a lot of contractors get their own personal laptop? Sure. Eventually it all comes from the same pot of (IT) money. There just seems to be a lot of excess at NAVAIR when compared to output in certain program offices. Not all offices, of course, but there could definitely be some improved efficiencies (no different than the rest of the Navy).
magnetfreezer
Well-Known Member
If it was they probably would have removed media player from the image... quite a lot of valid uses for it (playing strike videos, streaming VTCs/etc. in JOC type environments
Also, while google and microsoft have given unlimited storage for decades, NMCI has absurd caps. I think it was something like 250 MB when I was in a fleet squadron (2013-2016). I have 3 gb now for email apparently, up from 2 I think last year. Sure, over the past ten years I should have taken better care to delete the junk with attachments that flow in on a daily basis. If this upgrade is across everyone, then my complaint is slowly being addressed.
Also, total squadron share-drive was limited to something like 36GB (again for a deployable squadron... so I get the boat thing... but one 3x3x6 foot box could store insane amounts of TBs on the boat). Unreal. And when you can buy 4TB of storage for 99.99, or rent at about 2 cents per GB, it is absurd. While these prices are better than they were back in 2014, they aren't so much so that the entire squadron share drive being under 36GB being a hard limit made any sense whatsoever except for laziness. Hell, just the number of flight boots I've gotten probably would have upped our entire squadron's share drive to the TB level easily. So it's not expensive comparatively...
But my guess is it all comes down to the boat folks. Related example; our squadron was not able to get an exemption from the boat IT folks to use a USB device to update our Garmin GPSs when needed on NMCI. Back in 2014 I tracked down an email thread from like 2010 or so on the same issue, and was unable to get any traction. So what we ended up having to do is fly with outdated databases until the next port call, when I (when it was my job) would grab the cards from Mx, and update them on my laptop from the hotel. Totally the norm(/SARCASM) for aircraft nav updates (never logged a single thing in nalcomis). It all worked out fine; it would probably take an E-2 with expired GPS NAV being the reason for a mishap to make a change there. Odds are super slim that that would ever cause one, obviously. But it's the same odds with flying with expired paper pubs, or expired foreflight, and I don't know many pilots that would come clean out of that post mishap.
Also, total squadron share-drive was limited to something like 36GB (again for a deployable squadron... so I get the boat thing... but one 3x3x6 foot box could store insane amounts of TBs on the boat). Unreal. And when you can buy 4TB of storage for 99.99, or rent at about 2 cents per GB, it is absurd. While these prices are better than they were back in 2014, they aren't so much so that the entire squadron share drive being under 36GB being a hard limit made any sense whatsoever except for laziness. Hell, just the number of flight boots I've gotten probably would have upped our entire squadron's share drive to the TB level easily. So it's not expensive comparatively...
But my guess is it all comes down to the boat folks. Related example; our squadron was not able to get an exemption from the boat IT folks to use a USB device to update our Garmin GPSs when needed on NMCI. Back in 2014 I tracked down an email thread from like 2010 or so on the same issue, and was unable to get any traction. So what we ended up having to do is fly with outdated databases until the next port call, when I (when it was my job) would grab the cards from Mx, and update them on my laptop from the hotel. Totally the norm(/SARCASM) for aircraft nav updates (never logged a single thing in nalcomis). It all worked out fine; it would probably take an E-2 with expired GPS NAV being the reason for a mishap to make a change there. Odds are super slim that that would ever cause one, obviously. But it's the same odds with flying with expired paper pubs, or expired foreflight, and I don't know many pilots that would come clean out of that post mishap.
There's a lot less than you can blame on "lazy programmers" than you think. Go look at the ridiculous interview process to get a developer role at a FAANG or MS. They don't hire scrubs. But the devs also don't control the business priorities; that's the product folks. So if you want to cast stones at the folks who don't understand that 20 percent of the features get used 80 percent of the time, well . . .
- Someone who isn't a software engineer, but who works in software engineering
No, I mean keeping the system from auto locking. Having media capability is a good thing.
That's not exclusively an NMCI issue. Get stuck with DISA's mail.mil today and you're looking at 500MB.