Currently I use OneNote to manage projects and such. I've yet to find a really good cross-platform tool that works as well. Plans for 2013, more OSS, less MS. More coding, less managing.
1,856 karma · joined May 20, 2011
If you live in a larger urban area in the US, odds are that you can encounter several dozen languages in a day.
Zero. The janitors and the landscapers of the company don't speak much English. The baker at the ethnic grocery down the street doesn't speak English, but his daughter does.
If I drive 1000 km to the southwest, I'm still in Texas... :) If I wish to drive to the nearest ski resort, I spend most of the drive time getting across the damn state! If I want to hear about 40 different languages, I just go to the nearest shopping mall or to the cafe in the next building.
Yes, but you can be a dick to the employees of your US subsidiaries. (Personal experience with a few German corporations led to this observation...)
You need decent hardware, I've got a beefy i7 laptop with lots of DRAM and will be adding an additional SSD. You can do better with tower or remoting elsewhere, but it's nice to have the whole environment along sometimes.
Yes, Microsoft has a patent on that with the release of Windows 8... :D
Vexed by the ease that malware slash through my defenses, I switched to running Linux as the main OS on my laptop and every other OS as a VM. It's amazing that Linux can deal with my hardware better than the OEM recovery disk. And if I need to reinstall or migrate, I can just copy the VMs from backup. I was using VMs on the other OSes, now Windows 7 joins the crowd.
Windows 7 Ubuntu 12.04 OS X Windows 8
Windows 7 earns my bread, it works, and most of the time works well for clients and friends. Ubuntu is my goto "Unix/Linux" for OSS development, friends and resolving Windows issues.* OS X, use it part-time at work and friends, couldn't justify the cost of the hardware and some other quibbles. Windows 8 is a UI failure for the power user and admin.
The problem is that Microsoft still doesn't communicate it's big vision to developers at large. There's a lot of dead ends and blind alleys that people get led into...
I'm currently commited 80% timewise to the MS stack, but over the last decade alternatives have matured, and attitudes among the folks with the purse strings have changed towards other tech options in the marketplace. It was another weird quirk of timing that I read this news about Expression while installing various Python packages on a Linux box...
It's hard to dig the facts out of the machine. I was sitting in a Windows 8/Azure presentation last week and ask the Microsoft presenter several uncomfortable questions that he didn't want to answer. :(
Even some of my hardcore Redmond loving co-workers have been playing with Linux and we have discuss the possibility of utilizing some of the nifty Python/C data tools that have matured over the last decade for analysis and ETL.
You're making a big assumption. Not everybody has the time to design, source and test a complex system from the component level. (Nor do programmers drop down to the machine code level for every project.) Many kit builders have the background, but still must juggle other priorities in their life.
Ideally folks should learn what's going on at the component level. With the free resources available online, that's easier than in the past. But no one should be forced to go through Boylestad or NEET just to play with a LED.
Adafruit and newer companies of this ilk fill a need for us oldtimers and the newcomers. Many of my old sources of various parts and kits are dead, evolved or just didn't handle the transition to the internet well.