Slightly off-topic, but I'd like to recommend the Silo Series also by the author of this blog post. They're perhaps not life-altering in content, but enjoyable sci-fi reads, nonetheless.
FORTRAN is deeply ingrained in engineering culture. A lot of legacy (and some new development) is written in it. Though, this is slowly shifting with the prevalence of MATLAB in universities.
I did some research on the applications of micro optics and found that arrays of micro lenses can enable glasses-free 3D displays [0]. I haven't been able to find any recent articles about this effort, though. Anyone heard any news related to this or any other tech that micro optics enable?
My computing setup is the same in spirit as the one described in the article. In my experience, the maintenance overhead is quite small and syncing is a non-issue with a nix tool called unison. It's basically a bi-directional rsync.
Keeping my working directories in sync is as simple as running unison each time I boot my netbook only. This assumes that you have an internet accessible nix machine already in place for other purposes. Understandably, that may not always be the case.