US Army may be about to 'waste' up to $22b on Microsoft HoloLens | Hacker News Reader

US Army may be about to 'waste' up to $22b on Microsoft HoloLens

theregister.com

25 pointssamizdis21 comments

The augmented-reality goggles were bought for training purposes. Who cares if they aren't used in the field. They aren't intended for that. Besides how are you going to use your iPhone to train a soldier? World of Tanks maybe?

It's good thing that new technology options are explored. If it fails, big deal, we move on to the next thing.

See: (DoD) Audit – Army’s $22B mixed-reality Goggle needs more Soldier input

https://www.armytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/04/22/...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31140568

The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation...

It's happening. There's no going back. "Waste" implies unnecessary sunk cost. It's the first of its kind, so they may or may not hit the mark, but it will set the benchmark for future revisions/enhancements to the tech, whether it's the HoloLens or not.

Seeing how effective WhatsApp was at completely obliterating all the American military plans in Afghanistan in just days, would it not be better to spend the money on buying a social network? Perhaps they could waste their money outbidding Elon on Twitter instead.

A reminder to watch Black Mirror Season 3. There is an ugly future we're staring down the barrel of, illustrated in one of the episodes.

This is simply a pointless transfer of a huge sum of taxpayer money from the US government to Microsoft.

Overly cynical maybe?

No. This is Microsoft. Rebooting in the middle of a firefight is contraindicated. Force-installing upgrades, moreso.

I don't think I've actively used a Windows computer in 16 years for much beyond VR, but, I don't think I've seen a force-installed upgrade since XP. Is this really a thing?

If you haven't disabled upgrades, most modern versions will force download and install the updates in the background and then reboot without your consent. Sometimes in the middle of what you are doing, but less so on the very newest versions of windows.

With no countermeasures, Windows 10 (2016-2022) will try to reboot at local night regardless of what you have running if it has downloaded and staged an update, so long as it believes no one is around to stop it.

With partial countermeasures, like disabling the Windows Update service, several other services (Windows Update Medic (WaasMedic) and Update Orchestrator (usosvc)) and scheduled tasks will do a variety of things silently to make WU active again. It may try to update at strange times after making those repairs. Sometimes, it grabs new firmware for OEM laptops and installs that during the reboot. That's not comforting in the slightest.

If you delete all the associated scheduled tasks and manually disable all of those services, you can get a few months, maybe a year or five of uptime.

I hate the use of the word counter measures. a better way to phrase this is "the default settings are to auto update, which can be disabled if the user wants to"

I wish it was that easy.

I run windows 10 pro. I am "forced" (because I make zero effort to stop it) one update/reboot cycle a month, unless there's literally a zero day, which they think is more urgent than rolling into patch Tuesday.

A lot of the preferences of Windows 10 that people hate, (ads, extra telemetry, cortana etc) aren't even defaults, the system explicitly asks you when you install it. But if you only know Windows 10 from pre-installed prebuilt computers, manufacturers make those choices for you.

It's not a 'one toggle to turn it off' thing. They've gone to extra effort to make it hard to disable, to the point that you need to do many actions in the right sequence or all your work will be auto-reverted.

Why go through all those lengths when you can simply disable automatic updates in the policy editor? Then you can apply them whenever it's convenient to you.

That's usually step one. Historically, the policy you're referring to is broken, or is not specifically for "that". [1]

Updates are officially required. [2]

Each release makes it more difficult to positively force WU to fail with user-facing tools. So now, in 2022, after 13 major releases with different UIs, waasmedic logic, and policy effects, when I need to keep a computer online, I don't consider the options that I've found to have failed before (where failure is equal to rebooting). I kill the components of WU, repairs to WU, and repairs to the tools that repair WU.

As a result, or as a consequence, you decide, I usually don't get updates again for a long while.

[1] https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/30...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Updates_and_support

Oh yeah it is. https://youtu.be/GzJhdkIZ8yc

Yup. Happened to me recently (last year?) on Windows 10. With the choice between reboot now, or reboot now. Followed by a 4 hour update & reboot cycle. Bummer for our client waiting for a new binary with a critical update..

Having seen a project on a smaller scale but equally wasteful going through tons of work and huge costs only for the end user to go “but it’s more practical to use my phone”, I would say that this is in no way overly cynical, it’s very accurate criticism.

We all grew up with scifi and would love to see cool stuff like lightsabers and hoverboards even if they aren’t practical, but there’s a reason we don’t want government funds wasted on that, even if the politicians and project managers did “see this really cool show where a soldier on a hover board rode in and saved the day with his lightsaber”

It’s not lack of imagination, it’s a realistic focus on the problems that this claims to solve, which are much better solved with more straight forward means.

This is significantly more than what the US has given Ukrainian military, which has been enough to stop the Russian military.

Having used the Hololens I have a hard time believing it's that useful, or useful at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com