Pie charts have a lot of inherent issues. In many cases a bar chart is a much better choice, though pie charts can be useful if certain conditions are met.

For more insight into why pie charts are often a poor visualization choice, read Steve Wexler's recent book, The Big Picture.

I ran into this exact quandry when my home thermostat died late last year. Didn't want Nest/Google nor anyone else getting my data. Furthermore, I'm rural so broadband is expensive and sometimes flakey, so that was another reason to want a local-net-only solution, but there were no good ones I could find.

So I just built my own smart thermostat based on a Raspberry Pi: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fchaeron%2Fthermostat

Since then, I've added battery-powered remote sensors (temp, humidity, pressure, water detection, etc.) to monitor key areas in and outside of the house. These were based on Arduinos (to keep power usage low) and the open source MySensors framework (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysensors.org%2F)

Fun project, works great, no security issues or cloud crap. ;-)

More recently I've built on that experience and am working on a dirt bike telemetry project which is based on an Arduino Mega with a GPS module, 9-axis motion sensor, hall effect sensors (for wheel spin/RPM detection) and more. The device captures real time info about the location and movement of the bike (eg. pitch, lean angle, etc.) and then can be used to overlay gauges and a moving 3D bike model over top of headcam footage captured during a ride.

No wifi...no support outside the USA....onerous DRM.

What a waste of time from Amazon. They could have pwned the ebook market just by fixing the above three things.

Very disappointing for a company of Amazon's stature.

Oh well....nothing to read here. (all puns intended)

In the winter time (and where I am, it's damned cold out during the winter...snow banks are over my head right now), I have to shut off the heat vent in my office.

The heat thrown my all the machines in here, one main dev box, 1 laptop and 3 small appliance servers, plus all the peripherals keep the office nicely heated all winter.

So...what waste heat...I use mine, thanks!

You can't. Manage that is.

Managing techies is an oxymoron.

You can lead them, if you're good, you have leadership skills and are lucky.

Try to "manage" them and you'll be well on your way to being yet another PHM.

Read some good books on leadership, and pray you learn something about it before your team writes you off.

The key question is why do you want to learn to program on Linux?

If it's to further career goals, then it would be best to look forwards and not back. And almost all of the suggestions are looking back at the past.

The future? XRX - XQuery/REST/XForms (and XSLT).

Master that and you'll be able to deliver apps faster than the most rabid Rubyites and will be much in demand if a career is what you are after.

Fact is, if you don't know XRX, then you won't be working for my firm. ;-)

Commonly used languages never seem to die. COBOL is a good example, and a lucrative one, though probably not a lot of fun these days. C is partly there as well, though is good for foundation knowledge or if you have a hankering to work on Linux internals. But it's all past history. Look to new technologies, functional languages, concurrent languages (Erlang comes to mind) and stuff that makes XML easy and productive to use.

It'll be more fun, and more lucrative too, I'll bet.

My 2 cents worth.