Article jumped the shark for me with the following gem:
"... she uses a 2013 Dell laptop: new by government standards, but clunky enough compared with the cutting-edge devices of her former life that her young son asked what it was."
I'm sorry, but while other forms of technology are rapidly replacing laptops, they are still the dominant mobile productivity workhorses (unless you count things like tweeting and facebook as productivity tasks). This quote implies that laptops are so out-of-date that the child of a well-off tech worker wouldn't know what they are, akin to VHS players and cassette tapes. Ridiculous.
Also, by whose standard isn't a ~1-2 year old laptop new?
My guess is not that they are talking about just any 2013 Dell laptop, but that she is referring to something that is not of "ultrabook" standards of appearance and (probably) battery life optimization.
My impression of government hardware purchasing is that even while newer consumer models of laptops have managed to be lighter weight, have better battery life, and so on, they haven't met the litany of requirements needed for the government. She probably has a semi-custom Dell Latitude, which while a workhorse, is big and clunky and has less than desirable battery life. Oh and the screen resolution is probably 1366x768. Compare that to any ultrabook one could acquire today with a greater than HD quality display.
My guess is that her son is confused because before then she probably did most of her work with a Macbook Air, an ultrabook (perhaps even a Dell XPS), or even a Chromebook Pixel. These are all thinner, lighter, and with greater battery life. And they probably don't check the boxes the government wanted.
That's a good guess ... but I still think there's a bit of hyperbole going on. I'd think a gigantor-laptop would be similar enough to an ultrabook that the kid would figure it out. If I recast the question of 'what it was' to 'what is that hunk-of-junk looking laptop?', then I guess I could believe it.
On that topic ... many of the chunky plastic boxes are actually great machines. We have a choice from a few machines at work ... and almost no engineers choose an ultrabook. While ultrabooks are good for some things (watching videos, basic productivity like word, small excel workbooks, etc.), I wouldn't want to compile an operating system on one. I have a gigantic brick of a 'laptop' at work (I think it's a Precision M6700), and I wouldn't trade it for anything. It's nice to be able to slap it on and off a dock, to be able to connect it to four monitors without any janky USB video cards, and to be able to install tons of RAM.
Not only that but it implies that a young person was an expert on what was derigueur technology and not. It's a pretty shallow assertion and hard to take the article seriously after that.
Even the number of developers who compile an operating system on any regular basis is extremely small. For me, developing software is much less resource intensive than a light web browsing session.
I agree. There is a good chance that we are talking about a 2013 laptop with a floppy disk drive of a product line dating back to 2010 or earlier that Dell kept alive only because it is government approved, and that Dell sells with a nice high markup (keeping those floppy disks and the 100GB disk drives of those machines on the shelf for years costs money, you know)
Also, but that is complete speculation, it might not even have USB for security reasons. I can see that kids seeing something that you cannot plug your mouse into wouldn't think it to be a laptop.
one of my mates worked for QinetiQ (something on the weapons side) and he showed us his new works lap top a few years back with the USB ports filled up with solder.
There might also be a hint of "kids these days"-style ageism, where it's just implicitly assumed that nobody younger than author's age minus five has any idea about technology which is in any way "old" or "outdated" or "not being actively advertised on TV" (and that's another thing... )
And, yeah, laptops are in no way obsolete. Hell, the multi-billion-dollar PC gaming industry relies on desktop PCs, with towers and separate monitors, which is an even older design than laptops are (although, admittedly, not by much, depending on what you're willing to call a "laptop" as opposed to a "portable" or "luggable").
Yeah, that's ridiculous as written. However, I suspect the real issue was along the lines of it being a cheap fat plastic boxy affair with no SSD, rather than a slim metal MacBook or Ultrabook-like laptop - which, of course, Dell also sells.
> Also, by whose standard isn't a ~1-2 year old laptop new?
If someone is delivering >$10mm of value (conservative estimate) in a position where tool quality affects productivity, I'd probably get the newest/best laptop for her. It's entirely possible this position doesn't deliver that much value, but it should.
I've never really been a fan of re-using >1y old laptops as primary machines for new employees; it is a great way to make them feel unwanted from the start, for a $300-500 savings.
Yeah, you aren't supposed to replace laptops every year unless you just like everything new all the time just because. Good laptops can last quite longer than that.
However if she was a given a laptop which is several years old when they could have given her something from the current options, that's already questionable. Hardware can age, but giving aged hardware to begin with is not a good idea.
Taken in context it's not the age or the fact that it's a laptop. It's more that she was probably used to a Macbook Pro running OSX. Compared to that a Dell running windows could rightly be called clunky by some. It looks considerably different too. Depending on the age of her son it's a reasonable question to ask.
>"Depending on the age of her son it's a reasonable question to ask." //
This sort of phrase is not about her son at all. The statement is supposed to acquire the users agreement, as if the point is a truism, by demonstrating that even someone relatively naive to the field in question would be able to clearly see that the point is true - in this case that the laptop being used is antiquated.
2013 laptops aren't antiquated; no amount of "any fool can see" couching of that suggestion is going to convince me of that. It's just a badly judged piece of hyperbole by the writer.
I couldn't finish the article after reading about a scarecrow made of foil she made at four and taking apart a bicycle. Totally irrelevant and slightly patronizing.
"I wish they had people in there for this last two years that could make the trains run on time, not somebody who has big ideas"
We need both. The conundrum is that improvements are done through constant iteration and ideation. Government implementation is plagued by fear of fiat and fear of failure. The implementers need to be protected by the big idea people from the skeptics.
Floppy disks actually provide a rather pleasant form factor. It's large enough to feel meaningful, wide enough to not get lost between other objects, flat enough to be included in a binder with printed material. The only downsides are transfer speed, data capacity, and lifespan.
They're also AFAIK the only removable magnetic disk format that has been standardised (see ECMA-125), is completely open, and the drives are "dumb and simple" so they can't hide malware in the same way that the firmware of USB drives, hard drives, and optical drives can. From the point of view of openness and simplicity, the floppy has some advantages.
>so they can't hide malware in the same way that the firmware of USB drives, hard drives, and optical drives can.
There's a reasonable chance that many of these floppy drives are USB devices, so they'll have all of the disadvantages that come with USB drives.
Another approach could be to build a device that sits between a host and a USB drive and verifies that only mass storage operations take place, which should stop some of the badUSB attacks.
1. The complexity of the USB protocol enables certain kinds of attacks that aren't possible through a floppy interface.
2. The circuitry present in a USB drive is capable of being partially replaced with other kinds of circuits in a hard-to-detect way, whereas, it's pretty easy to verify that a floppy disk contains no malicious circuits.
These two vectors can be combined (along with other vulns) to do things like momentarily connect an unexpected modem to computers that are thought to be airgapped. (There are other, simpler, attacks such as having it exfiltrate data to a secret portion of the flash memory at the same time the drive is operating "as expected", by simply connecting itself as two devices.)
This isn't a problem for most people, but it's entirely possible that there are materials at the White House which need to resist this level of sophisticated, can-create-our-own-silicon-with-hidden-radios level of attack.
Remember, the NSA catalog was full of ordinary seeming devices that were meant to exfiltrate data or create radio links in to the computer.
If Sony's payroll, upcoming scripts, etc had been stored on floppies, stored in a safe when not in use, they could have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment.
I find it funny how we're mostly nitpicking over something the author probably didn't spend more than 3 seconds about and are missing what most of the article's even about, including the usually inflammatory women-in-tech initiatives she's trying to jump start in the region.
I don't think it's such a big deal for someone in her position to have such a laptop mostly because she's not exactly going to fix the default constant of failure in government IT and software by coding. She'll probably have a docking station and she can probably afford a decent monitor from there.
Best of luck, but I really hate to see people thrown to the wolves like this politically by being the first in a position with such little political backing to support them. I'll say that she's done her job admirably well when my mother in law knows about her position and staunchly opposes it (she'd vote for a cat if it was Republican and Reagan was on a Democrat ballot, I think she literally said that).
Meh, it jumped the shark for me in the first two paragraphs.
"We would never say that about reading.”
Now this is just a hunch, but I'm guessing most highly educated people have used their reading skills on a regular basis since school as compared to, say, what they learned in Calc III.
"... she uses a 2013 Dell laptop: new by government standards, but clunky enough compared with the cutting-edge devices of her former life that her young son asked what it was."
I'm sorry, but while other forms of technology are rapidly replacing laptops, they are still the dominant mobile productivity workhorses (unless you count things like tweeting and facebook as productivity tasks). This quote implies that laptops are so out-of-date that the child of a well-off tech worker wouldn't know what they are, akin to VHS players and cassette tapes. Ridiculous.
Also, by whose standard isn't a ~1-2 year old laptop new?