upthedale

Having a reflective moment a couple of weeks ago, I decided to learn something completely different (for me) and try Ruby. Not wanting to become type-cast as a Windows guy, I chose to do it on a unix based system. For this, I use an Ubuntu image in Virtual Box, and have been very happy.

> I just feel 'safer' in Windows.

I guess I could say I'm the same, though I think its more down to simply preferring Windows 7's UI/UX over the likes of Gnome and KDE. I've also tried customising a whole variety Linux window mangers, but always gave up.

So what I'm doing now is using Virtual Box in headless mode, then ssh-ing in with X-forwarding enabled. This gives me new icons in Windows 7's task bar for every 'remote' Linux window I have open. (though really I don't use much more than a terminal and maybe gvim). To an observer looking over my shoulder, it would just appear that the 'remote' Linux applications are native Windows programs.

[edit] I didn't really address your point about the learning curve to learning a new OS. This is valid issue and all I can suggest is to give it a try, and using a VM is an easy way to just dip in. You can get pre-installed Virtual Box images for many Linux distros such that it is really easy to get started. Unfortunately, my set-up took quite a bit of effort to get started (even with my familiarity with unix), but using a full-screen Linux VM is a good place to get started.

I guess what I was describing is just where you can go with it once you're comfortable.

Also some people don't consider anything made by Microsoft worth using.

Perhaps your senior programmer did fall into the former category, I don't know. However, you should take care not to fall into the latter.

But as for TFA, the non-music sync features of iCloud seem underwhelming. At the risk of playing the "other-phones-already-do-it" card, Windows (both Phone and PC) already does this with the Live services and Skydrive. Contacts, Calendar, Office documents and Photos can all be synced automatically. In addition, you get 25GB of space - no silly 30 day limits as with photos in iCloud.

What's the current state of play for Android?

The paper reasons that following a strict process is unrealistic, but that it is still worth it to "fake" a process, by presenting your system to others as though you had followed it (for example through documentation and reports that mimic the waterfall process, presented to players such as the VP and Director of Marketing in the OP).

[1] http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/presentatio...

The most interesting thing is that this paper was published before I was born in 1986. Even so, everyone in my class (this was about 18 months ago) was in agreement that the paper was still valid. (Though there would be the reasonable argument that we weren't able to give informed opinions having yet to experience software engineering in the real world at that point)

I have never used a Vaio, but I would question how much one contributes to being a perfect dev box. You can install Vim, Chromium and Xmonad on any other machine.

im still using some video monitor of theirs from the late 70s to catch up on youtubes.

Again, I haven't used Sony stuff from the 70s, it may well be fantastic. However, that was over 3 decades ago, and irrelevant when evaluating their behaviour in recent times. I certainly won't be buying anything from Sony anytime soon - I simply don't trust the brand.

My point is that to me, "Cloud" is a software engineering term. It affects the way I think about implementing services. However, the term is being misappropriated by the media (in a similar way to "Hacker") to describe what to me appears to be just plain-old web services (or paper-hostage-holding services to quote the linked article).

This is because consumers use these services in the same way they always have. The cloud hasn't introduced some new magical way of interacting with the services. Using Dropbox as an example, it is a Cloud service because it is implemented on top of AWS. That's an internal technical issue though, of interest to the audience of HN, but not to the general public [1].

To summarise, I agree that "the Cloud" is overused, but is of interest from a technical point of view. However, the linked article is not a technical article for cloud implementers, but rather service consumers.

[1] There is the separate issue of how well the cloud service has been implemented, as the recent AWS outage has reminded us. Having a robust, secure service is of course important to the lay consumer. But services need to be robust and secure whether they are cloud based or not.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/interop/

[edit] I've just thought, the Ruby and Python support might technically be through .Net via IronRuby and IronPython, but I'm not sure. This certainly doesn't apply to PHP or Java though.

I find the LHS to be so messy and inconsistent that at a quick glance, I almost feel like it would be too much effort to digest the information. The use of centre-aligned text is probably the culprit, with the inconsistency of font-size and weighting contributing to this.

On the RHS, I personally find it much easier to just scan my eyes down the 2 columns of text to find useful information. The alignment of the days and times in the regular classes section is particularly easier to read I find.