Monday, February 27, 2017

Report: Half of MCPS Chromebooks "died" during routine update (Photos)

To hear the press releases tell it, Montgomery County Councilmember Hans Riemer is our in-house tech guru. An announcement of his partisan political appointment to an FCC advisory committee stated that Mr. Riemer "is responsible for oversight and the development of Montgomery County’s information technology and telecommunications infrastructure.”

A few paragraphs later, it claims that "Riemer has strengthened Montgomery County’s digital infrastructure." Right. You mean the same county that was found to be running on Windows 2000 four years after Riemer took office, and whose school system's computer network was found by a state audit to be as secure as a screen door on a submarine?

Speaking of schools, Riemer's press release credits him with having "championed the growing deployment of Chromebooks in the County’s public schools."

Let's listen in to the Riemer digital revolution at MCPS:

Beep. Bzzzzzzzzt.

Uh oh.

MCPS tried to install an update to their 120,000 Chromebooks, and..."half their fleet died," tweets Kenn White. With Hans Riemer fully "responsible," we continue our streak of success as Tech Capital of the World. 

Not.

34 comments:

Anonymous said...

30% of 30% = 9%, not "one half".

"Kenn White" is as innumerate as you are.

Robert Dyer said...

Half is half. You sound like Boss Hogg trying to fool Roscoe P. Coltrane with your alternative math.

Anonymous said...

As I read this only 13% of the total of 120K have failed, like you Dyer to do the MATH!

Robert Dyer said...

7:26: Regular readers know your simpleton strategy by now: Hit hard by another Robert Dyer expose that makes your bosses look like idiots, you pivot, make up an alternative math equation, and then just keep posting it.

Folks, I predict 6 months from now this moron will still be posting this "only 13%!!!!" in comment sections, a la when I exposed black students are more likely to be suspended in MCPS than in Texas public schools.

You're not the sharpest tool in the drawer using Boss Hogg math in a highly-educated place like Montgomery County. Just a tool, period.

Anonymous said...

You really are starting to sound unhinged...

Anonymous said...

50,000 (out of 120,000) were updated
30% of these 50,000 had issues, or 15,000 workstations
15,000 workstations (out of 120,000) equals 12.5% and NOT "half"

Anonymous said...

16 months later, Dyer still can't figure out how fractions and percentages work.

http://robertdyer.blogspot.com/2015/11/black-students-more-likely-to-be.html?showComment=1446842557219&m=1

He's probably one of those people who thinks that a third-pound burger is smaller than a quarter-pound burger.

Anonymous said...

Hans "Windows 2000" Riemer. He's calling the Lotus Notes Help desk at the moment. I kept trying to search Ivanka Trump, and was getting nothing. That is when I realized, my kid's MCPS account was open in my browser. Seems to filter any news or sites that are not falling off the Left edge.

Anonymous said...

Correction: first number should have been 41.7% rather than "30%"

Thus, 41.7% * 30% = 12.5%.

Skippy said...

Is it common for Chromebooks to have problems like this?
I thought they were relatively low maintenance.

Anonymous said...

@7:36 Please stop. Your innumeracy is being made blatantly obvious by your comments on the mathematics of this issue.

I am honestly scared by the notion you would have any elected responsibility for the County's over $5 billion annual budget.

Anonymous said...

@8:02 IT guy here. It's basically the fault of Google and how some software is implemented on Chromebooks. The latest update put stricter requirements on SSL (encrypted) connections to websites, but the way it's implemented in Chromebooks (via a proxy) means this breaks stuff.

It's not really the fault of the IT manager at MCPS in _why_ this issue is happening, but they should _test_ updates before rolling them out to tens of thousands of users. There is always the chance an update will break something in a serious way (I know this from experience).

Skippy said...

@8:06 AM Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Innumeracy combined with inability to ever admit that you are wrong, are really bad, Dyer.

Since you probably won't be able to fix those traits any time soon, I strongly recommend that you steer clear of any topic even remotely related to statistics, to save yourself from further embarrassment.

Anonymous said...

@ 7:51 am - Why are you using your kid's computer on a Monday morning?

Anonymous said...

Why is Dyer alluding to Dukes of Hazzard? That show has been off the air for 32 years now.

Creepy middle-aged dude.

Anonymous said...

@1125- because it reminds him of the last time he got laid

Anonymous said...

I made a screenshot of this comments section so that he can't delete proof of his on ineptitude next time he tries to run for office.

Anonymous said...

I imagine when it rains outside, Dyer stares at the storm clouds with his fist raised, yelling, "Curse You Hans Reimer! This is all your fault!"

Anonymous said...

Here is Kenn White's Twitter feed:

https://mobile.twitter.com/kennwhite?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Scroll back to February 25 for full conext. This is NOT an issue that is unique to MoCo.

Anonymous said...

#westbardBESTbard

#unhinged

Anonymous said...

Robert Dyer has been a disruptor in local media and in local politics, so he's being attacked by the legacy/status quo folks in both groups.

Anonymous said...

"Disruptor":

See: "Troll"

Robert Dyer said...

Who are you going to believe - the anonymous paid troll, or the tweet of the actual IT expert pictured above, which clearly states half the fleet died?

Nice try, Boss Hogg.

Robert Dyer said...

7:49: Exactly as in this case, my reporting matched up exactly with what the study on black youth in MoCo explicitly stated - they are 3x as likely to be suspended as white students in MCPS. The Texas study I cited explicitly stated students there were only 2x as likely to be suspended.

So, please, do go back and look at that article, and then consider the credibility of my evidence-based reporting vs. the fictional math of an anonymous girly man coward paid troll. No contest.

Robert Dyer said...

7:43: "Half the fleet" is 50% of all Chromebooks. To use your alternative facts, he would have to have tweeted "Half of those updated" or "12.5% of the fleet." Let's stick with the real facts tweeted by the actual expert, as I did in this report.

Robert Dyer said...

8:02: Only when Hans Riemer is in charge. Helpless Hans!

Anonymous said...

Kenn White, whom I never heard of before yesterday morning, can't do arithmetic either. The number of Chromebooks that crashed during the Symantec upgrade was 12.5%, as his copied article makes absolutely clear.

Dyer, you just keep making a bigger fool of yourself by denying what is obvious to everyone else.

Anonymous said...

@8:19- Was my Notebook. Kids login with their Google MCPS Google account to do homework. So when I was searching did not notice Google is logged in under their account. They block Drudge and Wikipedia too, they don't want kids using that.

Robert Dyer said...

5:07: Kenn White is a computer expert, and you're an anonymous ex-con girly man coward crouched over a keyboard in your mom's basement (or a Councilmember/developer's office - kind of the same thing, if you know what I mean). Who do you think people believe?

Anonymous said...

To build on the comment from 8:06, what's happened here comes down to this bug reported to the Google Chrome team:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=694593

In short, MCPS is using a product called BlueCoat to filter requests to the web (to prevent malicious pages, porn, etc). BlueCoat is cracking open encrypted requests, so that you can't get past their filtering by simply doing https. When they do this, they're breaking any encryption that uses a new encryption standard. Google is testing out using that new standard in their update process. So, BlueCoat breaks the new encryption negotiation, that breaks the Google update, that breaks the Chromebooks.

This really boils down to BlueCoat breaking stuff. Google should have been less aggressive about using the new standard, but the main fault here is with BlueCoat. This really has nothing to do with the county council at all.

I'm actually fine with MCPS folks reporting bugs to Google, and I'd like to encourage them to continue to do so. It's only by people reporting stuff publicly that problems between vendors like this come out & get fixed. Making fun of the MCPS staff for trying to fix stuff like this doesn't help get anything fixed.

Anonymous said...

9:22AM Has no idea who posted, but decides to double down on the insults. Snippy.

Anonymous said...

The original post says 50,000 Chromebooks were updated, of which 30% (that is, 15,000) failed.

If the computers under study are the 50,000 updated Chromebooks, 30% failed.

If the computers under study are the 120,000 Chromebooks in Montgomery County Public Schools, 15,000 (12.5%%) failed.

Either way, the numbers don't support a 50% failure rate.

Robert Dyer, where are you getting the 50% failure rate? You need to explain your reasoning or concede that the critics of this post are correct.0

Robert Dyer said...

6:47: It says very clearly in the tweet pictured above that half of the fleet died. "The fleet" is the entire, total number of Chromebooks MCPS has. Half of that fleet "died." Is English not your first language?