Posts made by coliver

@scottalanmiller I would recommend it. If for nothing else then it being a fairly novel experience.

@ambarishrh said:

I was also thinking about that, but due to the recent vulnerability on ssl I was requested to do a VPN instead. It's hard to convince for just https instead of VPN in this case!

Ideally I would like to restrict access only to that tablet IP. Issue is that tablet will be roaming and so don't have a static ip. So VPN would be more useful as I can white list only that traffic.

Isn't OpenVPN an SSL VPN?

@scottalanmiller Yep that is the intention, even The Gabben (Gabe Newell) has said that he doesn't want to compete with Microsoft in the Windows Market, he wants to compete with them in the Xbox market. He also has said that they are investing in Linux and open source so hardware manufacturers would start developing drivers for the platform to mirror the performance and quality to what is on Windows.

@scottalanmiller Yep I re-purchased BG original on Android and have played through a bit of it. Amazing how well that engine works with a touch interface.

@scottalanmiller said:

What about Balder's Gate, Icewind Dale or Neverwinter Nights.

I'm going to second these recommendations Baldur's gate is the series that got me into gaming. It was recently re-released on Steam and Android (maybe iOS as well?) and can generally be found for almost nothing during Steam sales. GoG has Icewind Dale available and it seems to be working with Windows 8.

@Mike-Ralston SteamOS is still very much a beta project. From everything I've read it is a developer test build that is available. Running it as a dedicated machine and expecting it to have feature parity with a released version of Windows doesn't really make sense.

It has from the start been Steam in big picture mode, at no point has it been a full fledged OS. The design was to compete with modern day consoles and not be a PC replacement.

I've tried it on my own Mini-ITX rig and the experience was abysmal, they are supposedly working on getting more hardware support and SteamOS certified drivers from AMD and Nvidia but for right now they are using the Debian hardware specific drivers which leaves a bit of a performance gap.

I think in the long run once it is fully released it can be a competitive "console"... right now though there are a ton of issues that Valve needs to work around.

I've had issues with some Asus laptops where the drivers on their site were for different hardware then what was installed on the machine. I actually had to figure out what the underlying hardware was and go to the manufacturer's website to get those drivers. I hope Lenovo, arguably a more "enterprise" company, doesn't have the same issues.

This is going to sound cliche... but any of the Kix variants I loved.

@g.jacobse said:

@ajstringham said:

@g.jacobse said:

@ajstringham
In some regard Earth has become uninhabitable...

The moon is uninhabitable, space is uninhabitable.. and yet - there we are.. There are resources that are there that we would be able to harvest for the next step.

Mount Everest is uninhabitable, and yet thousands of people clammer up it's slopes - risking death or serious injury for the glory, the adventure, and the curiosity..

True. But consider this: satellites orbit earth from space, and the moon is only something like 3 days away. Mars is supposed to be something like 8 months away. I get that going to Mars would be amazing, but the expression "long ways from home" doesn't even begin to cover it. If something goes wrong, well, you're on your own.

And climbing Everest is cool but foolish IMHO.

It is very much an 'argument' that could go both ways... Climbing Everest or exploring space (inner or outer) - It's cool, It's neat, It's exciting, It's dangerous, it's pointless, its,..

If we do not venture into space, we are limiting our species to a slow painful death because we would stagnate. The human mind is mapped for exploration, excitement, and finding new things. Our minds would shut down if we didn't go.

Not to mention - We are just but a small speck in the Galactic Ocean of Space - If would be such a waste to NOT go. Think of Christopher Columbus and discovery of the New World.. Where would we Americans be had he not ventured into the unknown and the dangerous waters of monsters and myth.

Christopher Columbus probably isn't the best example... just saying.

I have a kindle fire original and have gotten a lot of use out of it. The screen actually is pretty good to read off of.

If you need book recommendations for a 5 year old my sister-in-law is a elementary school librarian who loves to give recommendations.

@ajstringham said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@ajstringham said:

Plus when you consider all the jobs in manufacturing, science and engineering that came about as a result of the space race, it was very good towards establishing the US as an even more dominant power in the world.

All jobs paid for by tax dollars. Those same jobs could have been used to make things that were useful rather than just burning energy doing something useless. It lowered our ability to focus on what mattered. It was a huge risk and there is no way to know if it kept us safe or put us in danger.

During the space race era is when we fell behind the Soviet Union. While we were blowing crazy resources they spent fewer and built a much stronger space program and a stronger military as well. The space race did not work out well for us looking at it historically. And the last forty years have left us the laughing stock of the world in terms of space flight cost, usefulness and safety.

That doesn't sound quite right.

Sadly it kind of is. The Soviets were able to pump a ton of their fledgling dollars into their military, if it came to an all out war (that didn't include nukes) the US and allies would have probably lost. It was being unable to bankroll that military that really killed the Soviets... As much as we like to think that democracy won, if it came to all out battle it probably would have gone the other way.

@Martin9700 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

The moon lacks the necessary gravity for a long term colony. We don't have the technology to make people live on the moon, not in the same way. Mars is a viable long term colony location for which we are ready to live on today. The only issue with Mars is getting there, not living on it.

Not entirely true, a VERY recent study (it was on Facebook, so it has to be true) said that with today's equipment failure rates current plans to inhabit Mars would fail. But as a stretch goal it's fantastic, and as Elon Musk once noted it shouldn't be a national priority, but we ought to at least spend as much money on it as we do lipstick research (which is in the hundreds of millions).

It was by a team of MIT engineers. I think this is part of the announcement although I haven't found the paper yet. https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/technical-feasibility-mars-one-1014

@ajstringham said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Martin9700 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

The moon lacks the necessary gravity for a long term colony. We don't have the technology to make people live on the moon, not in the same way. Mars is a viable long term colony location for which we are ready to live on today. The only issue with Mars is getting there, not living on it.

Not entirely true, a VERY recent study (it was on Facebook, so it has to be true) said that with today's equipment failure rates current plans to inhabit Mars would fail. But as a stretch goal it's fantastic, and as Elon Musk once noted it shouldn't be a national priority, but we ought to at least spend as much money on it as we do lipstick research (which is in the hundreds of millions).

Are they saying that things like the oxygen scrubbers would be unmaintainable over a long enough time to be replenished from earth? What failure rates are of primary concern?

I agree that it should not be a priority. I love space travel but even feel that the lunar landings in the 1960s were completely foolish.

Going to the moon was more of a "my stick is bigger than your stick" thing between Russia and the US. However, it's been proven that the technology breakthroughs and the stimulus to the economy made that a very worthwhile venture.

I was about to say the same thing. You just need to look at the technologies introduced by NASA around that time and decades later to know it was worth it.

Actually found a list by NASA (http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html).

@scottalanmiller Not when those substances are extremely rare on earth.

I agree though without further advances in technology it would be prohibitively expensive to do any colonial mining (although I believe that NASA/Private Companies have been seriously looking at near impact asteroid mining). Although getting things off of the moon would be much easier/less expensive then getting them off of the Earth or Mars.

@ajstringham said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@ajstringham said:

Still, Mars is uninhabitable. Why do we care to set foot on there?

Um, to start a colony. The only reason they've ever talked about going there.

Yeah, but as I said, right now it's not livable. It was designed to be lived on by humans.

I don't think I follow this sentence? What was designed for humans?

I think the biggest reason of going to Mars is that we can develop technologies to better harness the resources that are available on other celestial bodies.

My biggest thing right now is why are we so focused on getting to Mars when we haven't made a livable colony on the moon? It would be the safer bet and a logical stepping stone to getting to Mars. It would also be a proving ground for said technologies, especially with the resources that are readily available on the moon for us to exploit (Helium3?)

@scottalanmiller said:

@coliver said:

Another recommendation, native support for WebDAV. I recently setup a server with WebDAV and like how it works.

Sharepoint is a WebDAV server.

Yep, so is the Owncloud server I setup several months ago.... I love how I can access the webdav side of it from any linux box... although I haven't been able to map it from within Windows 8 yet.

@scottalanmiller said:

@coliver said:

@ajstringham My undergrad didn't have an internship until the capstone/senior year. It is telling that a year after I graduated the academic in charge of my program was fired and it was closed...

RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) had a really interesting internship program, called a co-op, which was required for all tech students starting their sophomore year. It was a 10 week long internship that the majority of students were offered a full time job after their completed their degree and during summers. For a company to participate in the co-op though they had to agree not the headhunt the student until they had graduated (at least from what an undergrad-adviser told me). As a post-grad student this option wasn't available to me.

I'm at RIT now. RIT's coop program is an attempt to mimic the older one at Kettering University in Flint, MI. The two consider themselves head to head competitors in the engineering space.

Either way it seems to be a very effective means to get real world experience while in college, allowing the student to get the best of both worlds.

One of my fellow grad students did his coop with Meraki before they were bought by Cisco. He was hired by them after graduation and when he let them know he wanted to get his Master's (and doctorate) they offered to pay for it if he could do it while working. He was explaining his doctoral research proposal to me and it was fairly interesting although pretty far over my head.

@Reid-Cooper Ignore the man in the suit and sunglasses... he doesn't exist.

@scottalanmiller said:

1. Why isn't there any SMB protocol support on any mobile platform? Seems easy enough to do.

Does Android (or iOS) support NFS natively? For some reason I would like to see that supported before or concurrently with SMB.

2. Do we actually want SMB support if it were available?

Yes please. This would be a fantastic addition and make some troubleshooting that much easier.

3. How would we want it to work?

Right through the stock file browser would be the best.

Another recommendation, native support for WebDAV. I recently setup a server with WebDAV and like how it works.

One of the things that I had been working on to learn some Powershell was an automated script to create an AD user and an Office 365 mail account at the same time. I got 70% of the functionality I wanted and haven't been able to get back to it.