xradionut

Obvious developer is being Obvious.

If you are developing for Linux deployment, it doesn't make sense to develop on Windows. This is a no brainer. Likewise if I was to develop for IIS/SQL Server I wouldn't do so using my Linux environment.

Here's a use case: House shopping

You are driving through an older neighborhood close to commuter rail station looking for a house for you and your spouse. Driving past the station "posts" the schedule for the next three trains and bus. You can "see" the Zillow and the tax values of the houses you are looking are in real time. You glance at the elementary school on the corner and the rating comes up. Glance at another house and you see it is a rental where the police have been called 7 times in the past 6 months. Two doors down lives a sex offender. The trees in the are are a type that your wife is allergic to. The fire hydrant on the corner was last maintained in November. The street was repaved in 2007 when new water lines were installed. Animal control last patrolled on Tuesday. The deli down the street is expensive, but has good reviews.

And during this whole process, all you did was look out, while driving, not glance at your phone or car console.

They work equally well for observing higher primates. :D

We, (local crime watch), use the same types of cameras to keep an eye on vacant houses in the neighborhood. So far we've assisted the police in tracking vandals and drug dealers. (Not to mention countless non-criminal animals...)

"I am a bit tired of how much Ubuntu gets promoted compared to other Linux based solutions."

I find Ubuntu, (at least the LTS releases), to be the best supported distro for major third party applications and the easist for novices to use. I'm using it as development platform and as a VMware host for my Windows OS images. It has supports my Dell hardware better than Dell's Windows drivers. In time, I'll probably migrate to a different distro, but I don't have the cycles to spend on tweaking Linux, I just want a distro that works with what I need now.

I forgot that I had a toll tag too! :)

Not in my area. In the large urban-surban-exurban spawl areas in the US, cycling is not a practical method of commuting for the majority of workers.

Correction: Telecommuting means, one more spot, less pollution and one less annoying cyclist/motorist on the road. :)

The article mentions "free riders". As a motorist who's auto and gasoline taxes pay for the roads, has an annual auto inspection, it's mildly annoying to be trapped behind a slower cyclist who's not subject to those requirements. It becomes enraging when they break traffic laws and stage mass rides just to fuck with drivers.

Because CL works well enough. My spouse and I found a virtually new wheelchair for a friend with MS in two days with no middleman fee or hassle.

For niches, there's alternatives. My family and friends use other sites estate sales, radio gear, land sales, apartments, handymen, etc...

Lua Warrior would be a good port/sequel. I imagine the setting could be more futuristic and occur on the Moon.

After you've learned hundreds of interfaces over 3 decades, you learn that newer can be, but isn't always better. So when I see YAIR, (Yet Another Interface Redesign), I get a case of deja poo, (I have seen this shit before).

I believe MicroMint, (aka Steve Ciarcia's hardware company), offers Lua on a few ARM boards.

JavaScript is this generations Perl.

A colleague of mine worked in the fab, (South building on the Richardson campus), that developed TI's Lisp chip. Years later we found a complete Explorer system including documentation in a local surplus warehouse, bought it and sold it to a collector the next week. Yet another indirect benefit of the whole Lisp system era...

If you don't have some project in mind that scratches an itch, I'll give you the same answer I give my peers and juniors: Do something different that builds your skills.

There's terabytes of open data, tools and tutorials available on the internet. Build a tool that scrapes the FCC database and allows people to research radio station call signs. Dig into some of the NASA archives, do some image processing. Check out the growing infestation of humans, chart it on maps with the help of US Census data. Build a local weather application. Get a cheap SDR USB radio and build a different GUI to control it. Find your bank/credit unions quarterly posts on their respective government agencies websites and plot how much money they make from fees vs margin. Build a calculator app with advance functions. Tailor it for small business like a roofing contractor. Do any project in a different programming language, then port it to a third. Work through the problems at Programming Praxis or SICP. Tweak a game through Lua or whatever tool kit they offer...

That's only the retired folks and trust fund kids...

Run a copy of Windows in a VM and ditch Oracle's Java. That way you can run SSMS, etc...

I run Windows 7 and Server 2012 along with various versions SQL Server in VMWare on a Ubuntu host with no issues.

Then you realize that all they have to talk about is television or sports teams or LOL cat pictures or the toys they bought on credit.

Good farmers aren't Luddites.

I grew up spending half my childhood on the farm and half in the city. My uncle after surviving Korea, farm-raised fish decades before most, diversified into real estate and finances, had leading edge GPS, radio, sat computers and irrigation gear and sent his sons to college to get an edge in business, biology and computers. The family farm(s) and related enterprises are worth somewhere in the nine figures. (Not to mention the wind and solar power farms which they had been playing with on a smaller scale since the '70s to power pumps...)

I see that are you still believe in "democracy". Please do some serious research and follow the money. Let us know when you finally realize that you live in a plutocracy.

Not the smart ones. They lease shares.

"Africa would be revolutionized by it."

Correction: Healthcare in Africa "could" be revolutionized by it. No amount of tech/aid is going to "fix" Africa until decades of human greed and stupidity get reversed.

Much of my work related programming is SSDD tasks. (Same Shit, Different Day/Data) Occasionally I get to do something creative at the office, but the real joy comes from the side work and the hobby programming. Instead of dealing with Yet Another Pile Of PCrappy Data, I get to deal with microcontrollers, radios and antennas.

"gpg is hands down the better way for mortals..."

Snort! How many clients/friends/coworkers have you had to explain PGP, GPG, public keys or just compressing a file with a password to?

For us semi-interested cypto/security aware geeks, it's not difficult. Easier than learning the details about git or picking up Erlang. But for the normal user/client/manager it's like speaking Latin or the understanding Alchemy economics in Skyrim. PKI/GPG is one of those things that falls outside of their give-a-shit enough to understand circle.

"PGP is not in widespread use."

Depends on what industry/domain you work in. The reason PGP isn't more widely used is: It's expensive, it's complex to the typical "user" and businesses don't want to invest in real PKI even if they need it. (People are lazy and cheap...)

Add in the factor that most developers don't have the chops to figure out and implement nicer software based on the mess that is GPG. You have a few serious tools wrapping it used in ETL applications and ilk like Gpg4Win and the Bouncy Castle libraries.

I wouldn't mind having one of these with a "real" Linux distribution instead of Android to use as cheap terminal/workstation.

You can get 100% OSS virtual machines through MS Azure. There's a whole division set aside to pimp the MS cloud to folks that don't do MS software.

(As an aside, my Dell laptop runs Ubuntu and keeps the Windows OSes caged in VMs... :) )

I like email. But then again I've had email in some sort since the mid '80s and know how to use it as a tool. I don't do any instant messaging nor normally answer the office phone during work hours, it's too distracting. Very few things need immediate attention, filters and other means allow me to choose those.

Now they are heading back to making ODBC the primary data access API... Sigh...

When you work with the Microsoft stack, except for a few core technologies, you have no idea if the "hot" API or current solution Redmond is pushing will be supported or abandoned in a couple of years. Combine that with stapling Metro, a tablet/phone API to the side of the desktop in Windows 8, many developers I know are tired of being thrashed and burned.

As a developer/analyst/admin that works primary in the MS application/data realms, I'm bummed out that MS can't communicate with developers and seems very disfunctional vision-wise. But as someone who also uses OSS software and OSS OSes, I'm not tied to their whims. Neither are a growing number of my clients...

"I have found NumPy impossible to install."

Try using one of "mega" bundles from Enthought or Continuum. Anaconda CE installs easily on Windows and Linux.