When I started this job my Windows Phone died, and I started using a cheap Android phone, and I got a company iPhone. I had never realized how good I had it before. The other UIs are catching up to the WP8.1 in basic usability, but there are so many seemingly minor things that they do not do out of the box that is native to WP. I have since gone back to a Lumia 640 (yay for Black Friday and AT&T unlocks), but I still deal with frustrations with my iPhone every day.

@NattNatt said:

@Kelly said:

@NattNatt said:

@Kelly said:

@NattNatt said:

@NattNatt said:

@Kelly said:

I'd really like to play XCom 2, but I can't afford full retail at the moment.

isnt there a humble bundle with that in it atm..?

ah no, its the originals, enemy within and enemy unknown, sorry
https://www.humblebundle.com/

No worries. I had seen that earlier. That is a great bundle if I didn't already own everything in it. I wouldn't say I'm a Firaxis junkie, but I do own a lot of their games

I never got into them...I'm more a FPS guy, with occasional MOBA's...

I can get into an FPS now and then, although I haven't found one that compares to BF:BC2 yet. I got completely turned off on MOBAs with Heroes of Newerth. The communities are so negative.

Can't say I've heard of Heroes of Newerth...but dont think I'll check it out either lol, it's pretty much just DotA for me...BF3 was good, not played 4 though...

HoN was actually the first successor to DotA, but I haven't been back to it in years.

@NattNatt said:

@Kelly said:

@NattNatt said:

@NattNatt said:

@Kelly said:

I'd really like to play XCom 2, but I can't afford full retail at the moment.

isnt there a humble bundle with that in it atm..?

ah no, its the originals, enemy within and enemy unknown, sorry
https://www.humblebundle.com/

No worries. I had seen that earlier. That is a great bundle if I didn't already own everything in it. I wouldn't say I'm a Firaxis junkie, but I do own a lot of their games

I never got into them...I'm more a FPS guy, with occasional MOBA's...

I can get into an FPS now and then, although I haven't found one that compares to BF:BC2 yet. I got completely turned off on MOBAs with Heroes of Newerth. The communities are so negative.

It isn't free ($15 USD), but I really like something called the Flag Page (http://www.flagpage.com/). They have a very different way of putting together personality profiles. Instead of being based on scenarios it is based upon your emotional response to using different descriptors. For example if someone said that you were decisive how would that make you feel? Things like that. It was very eye opening to my wife and I when we did it in a way that the other tests weren't.

@NattNatt said:

@NattNatt said:

@Kelly said:

I'd really like to play XCom 2, but I can't afford full retail at the moment.

isnt there a humble bundle with that in it atm..?

ah no, its the originals, enemy within and enemy unknown, sorry
https://www.humblebundle.com/

No worries. I had seen that earlier. That is a great bundle if I didn't already own everything in it. I wouldn't say I'm a Firaxis junkie, but I do own a lot of their games

I'd really like to play XCom 2, but I can't afford full retail at the moment.

@scottalanmiller said:

Oh... and this came up because they PM'd me in 2014 and I just got around to following up on it. I went to respond and realized I never got responses from them long ago, they weren't green anymore, I'd not heard anything more from them and so looked up their history. Steve and Tucker were their two community people. Steve was in Austin in 2014.

They were supposed to cover my trip to SWL14, and while they got my flight, they never reimbursed me for my hotel. No response to my emails.

I got INFP-A. I always enjoy these tests. One thing that was very instructive for me was taking one before I went through counseling and then some maturing. My personality didn't change radically, but it evened out some of the extremes.

@Breffni-Potter said:

Apart from that, Virtual Box does more and is completely free.

What more does it do?

I ended up paying for Fusion since I'm on a Mac, and the performance difference seemed apparent to me. I'm thinking about switching back now though.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Basically you liked the bits that they inherited rather than the bits that they did Once the IBM engineering got old, there hasn't been anything usable out of Lenovo. Their gear, any designed by them, has been middling at best.

I won't agree with that, unless the Yoga design came from IBM. I really like the Yoga design. I realize it's a personal thing. But the design of the device is nice, solid, and functional. Sadly Lenovo hosted themselves and us with their network shim causing wireless issues up the ying/yang.

You like it BUT you have it so broken that you had to replace some of the hardware to get it functional, right? By any normal standard, that's not even a working device Normally people would deem needing to open their laptop and replace the parts that Lenovo can't fix and won't support as "utter failure." I get that you can still like it, but the bar for which you are willing to accept a device as "good" is dramatically below what I would accept as "passable."

Yoga is definitely not something IBM would have been involved with. IBM would never have let that out the door like that.

I'm only talking about the chassis, nothing more - not the motherboard/the wifi/the display (though the display is nice - personally I'm not a fan of ultra high res anymore when a system isn't designed specifically around it, i.e. iPad)

So yes liked the chassis - the rest - nope Lenovo deserves to burn in hell for what I and your wife had to do to work around those issues.

LOL, well okay. The physical chassis of the Yoga is perfectly fine for me. I don't like the power button but I do love the power connection, best one I've used yet (the physical port.) Weight is a little heavy, screen is decent but not my favourite. Keyboard is good but not my favourite. CPU is good, GPU is crap. But the plastic bits are okay.

We just purchased a 15" HP Spectre x360 which has the same style of flip mechanism. I'm curious how it performs in comparison to the Yoga.

@Dashrender said:

@Kelly said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Kelly said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Kelly said:

Flexibility and control mostly. So they can work from home or remotely without the tax of VPN.

There must be a piece missing here, how does the VirtualBox instance remove the need for a VPN?

They are running the computations locally on their laptop.

Can't they run them on the base OS?

The tools they need run much better in Linux, and these are all MBPs.

The idea of running this locally seems weird - why wouldn't you want to use the power available in a DC instead of the mundane amount on a laptop? unless of course the DC is either overloaded or just has old junk hardware.

This whole situation just seems weird to me.

Yup, decisions were made. Some good, some bad. Either way, that is the culture here, now. I'm working toward something that might move the compute to servers, but it will take time.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Kelly said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Kelly said:

Flexibility and control mostly. So they can work from home or remotely without the tax of VPN.

There must be a piece missing here, how does the VirtualBox instance remove the need for a VPN?

They are running the computations locally on their laptop.

Can't they run them on the base OS?

The tools they need run much better in Linux, and these are all MBPs.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Kelly said:

Flexibility and control mostly. So they can work from home or remotely without the tax of VPN.

There must be a piece missing here, how does the VirtualBox instance remove the need for a VPN?

They are running the computations locally on their laptop.

@StrongBad said:

@Kelly said:

@StrongBad said:

@Kelly said:

@StrongBad said:

Do many government agencies in the west use type 2 virtualization? I'm not saying they don't, but don't know where they would, either.

We are a government contractor and use a lot of type 2 hypervisors (mostly virtual box), and what the government says they can use is typically applied to anyone downstream.

What do you use them for?

Our scientists run computations locally using VMs.

And the upstream agencies would dictate the available hypervisor options?

is this like Linux computation nodes running on Windows desktops?

Upstream can dictate what they will allow their data to sit on or they won't give us their data. We've already had one agency tell us that we cannot use any Lenovo hardware in support of their systems.

@Dashrender said:

@Kelly said:

@StrongBad said:

Do many government agencies in the west use type 2 virtualization? I'm not saying they don't, but don't know where they would, either.

We are a government contractor and use a lot of type 2 hypervisors (mostly virtual box),

Might I ask - Why?

Flexibility and control mostly. So they can work from home or remotely without the tax of VPN.

@StrongBad said:

@Kelly said:

@StrongBad said:

Do many government agencies in the west use type 2 virtualization? I'm not saying they don't, but don't know where they would, either.

We are a government contractor and use a lot of type 2 hypervisors (mostly virtual box), and what the government says they can use is typically applied to anyone downstream.

What do you use them for?

Our scientists run computations locally using VMs.

@Breffni-Potter said:

Will it affect VMware? Their marketing is immense. People won't notice.

I would think that the average user of the above would be smarter than your average bear, and a bit more connected to IT related news. Perhpas not.

@StrongBad said:

Do many government agencies in the west use type 2 virtualization? I'm not saying they don't, but don't know where they would, either.

We are a government contractor and use a lot of type 2 hypervisors (mostly virtual box), and what the government says they can use is typically applied to anyone downstream.

@mlnews said:

VMware, a division of EMC, a division itself of Dell, has laid off the entire desktop / type 2 virtualization teams that make their Workstation and Fusion products. Does this mean the end of the products or, as speculation has it, moving development to China?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/27/vmware_fusion_and_workstation_development_team_fired/

Moving the dev to China could affect government adoption. Now we just need a type 2 hypervisor that integrates tightly with XS.

As for the article @Breffni-Potter. I like it. You have laid everything out very clearly for the non IT decision maker. I'm not sure if I would go with the FEAR acronym personally, but it is memorable.