I've played around with tcl/tk a bit and found it to be fun to use in the limited time I used it. You can get things up on the screen and do something useful with it almost immediately.
The only other language I've "programed" with is PHP.
I'm not a programmer, but I have been able to use PHP to make some pretty nice little dynamic web sites and mini-applications.
You don't have to be an expert to make effective use of it. You can open a PHP script and follow it.
The same can be true for many languages, I suppose - but for someone with practically no programming skills at all I've always found php to be the easiest to just pick up and do something useful with.
So, I'd say that one of the biggest reasons for it's popularity is that you can learn it very easily if you have no programming background. (I'm perhaps a special case, though - I consider myself to be a highly effective IT Systems Engineer with a great deal of background with computers so I pick these things up pretty quickly anyways.)
I was actually referring to the original poster that posted AC - the one that said "I'll tell you what I didn't get: an operating system that can speak WPA2 without shitting all over itself."
I have actually run about a dozen WiFi network installation projects (businesses/schools with over 50 AP's) in the last year.
I've also consulted various businesses around the state as part of my job, and not a single one was using EAP because of device compatibility.
It's a good tech, and hopefully in a couple years we'll see more stabilization in the WiFi market and better support for Enterprise wired and wireless line-live encryption and authentication. Microsoft made some big improvements with Vista and Server 2008 with 802.1x support out of the box.
So, aren't you glad you made an ass of yourself and insulted the wrong person? Go fuck yourself you little bitch.
It's conscious, rather than subconscious, if you ask me. It's not a mystery like "what makes someone attractive" - you look at a car with a "mean" look and you know why. Aggressive angles, sharp lines, etc. And aggressive look equates to engine power and speed with a car.
Nearly everyone likes a "mean" looking automobile; mostly because car makers generally put "mean" looking designs into sports cars or put in powerful engines.
They also had to drive dangerously close to the big rig they were driving behind in order to achieve any significant fuel savings.
So, if you're comfortable driving 20 inches from the bumper of an 18-wheeler, you could save yourself 75 cents on the commute! Of course, you might die, but let's not let the details get in the way of fuel economy..
I've seen some people do some really stupid things lately, seemingly to save gas.
The other day I'm behind this lady at Burger King, and we were probably about 4 cars back. Every time we moved up, she'd start the car, drive up, and then turn it off.
At first I thought maybe the car was overheating, but then why not just go in? It was still early enough and the dining room was open.
I almost wanted to get out and tell her "You stupid shit head, starting your car squirts an ass load of gas into the cylinders - you've probably used more gas in this line than you would sitting idle for an hour!"
People can be such morons..
The single best way to save gas in any car is to simply drive smoothly - don't accelerate too fast, don't drive over 60-70 on the highway, and try to stay a constant speed while driving. That's it. It's not magic and there's no magic solution.
Perhaps that's what he meant, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that he was just trolling and couldn't figure out what the hell he was doing.
WPA-EAP isn't quite as common as you make it out to be though; most of the time you'll find multiple SSID's for various networks (or an automatic mac-based authentication scheme.) It sucks because Wireless encryption/auth is still a moving target and it can be difficult to find a middle-ground between supporting the most devices and having the best security.
"The poster was referring to the Department of Education (Federal), not "getting the government out of education". "
Actually, the quote was "Most conservative right-wingers want to get rid of the Department of Education and government out of education all together."
So, who's not reading?
"And that lots of liberals refer to the "growing rich/poor divide" and such...which means that the divide was smaller before the USDE existed."
Correlation is NOT causality. Learn this. We don't know how much worse shape we'd be in if there was NO DoE.
The US has undergone a very big shift in economics - we are no longer an industrial/factory focused economy, we are an intellectual and services economy. Not completely, of course; but the trend continues.
Because of this, we need more educated and skilled workers in the workforce to keep this edge, and that means education, and it means everyone needs to be well educated.
"BTW, conservatives are generally for publicly-funded education but not for publicly-provided education."
I don't know if this would work, and I don't know if we should risk trying. I'd need more than a belief by some conservatives (whom also continually insist on NO regulation or very little regulation in the markets) before I'll bite. Free market sounds nice, and in a world where people didn't try to screw everyone as much as possible for a buck it might work. Unfortunately we don't live in that world so we need to make sure people are properly protected from the extremely powerful corporations in our society. I don't have a single problem with corporations, or big one, or being absurdly rich. I just need to know that it's being done fairly.
Sure, our education system needs improvement, but I got a really good K-12 education and most kids in the country are offered the same opportunity. You hear a lot of about failing schools in inner-city areas but the vast majority of the citizens in this country don't live in highly urban areas and public schools offer a good education.
I think the biggest problem in education in our society is "higher education" or the fact that a lot of us simply can't afford it, and the mistaken ideal that everyone should have a traditional college education for a general degree, instead of more focus on trade-specific schools which would be better for a great many people.
I don't base my decisions or ideals on someone else's ideals. I base them on my own experience and what I've learned. I hope you think about doing the same some day.
It's probably a "YMMV" type thing. Both notebooks I've been running Ubuntu on have Intel WNICs. And, there's sometimes big differences between Intel cards. Maybe I've gotten lucky.
The support is there in the OS, and I've found that Ununtu is better at dealing with LAN/WLAN switching and VPN connections than Vista (more flexibility for sure) and the problems usually come from driver issues (or kludgy work-arounds to make them work under Linux.)
So, you're pissed because you procrastinated until the last days of your warranty, and you ended up being late. And then, they told you to call them (with the hope that they might be able to do something for you) and you don't want to call them because you're lazy.
I don't love Apple and I think their prices are way too high for what you get, but c'mon man, that's stretching it. You screwed up. Don't blame Apple for your stupidity.
If it were up to "your kind" of conservative, the US would look like India: Extremely wealthy people live in high society and everyone else lives in dirt huts.
Getting the government out of education would put the final nail in the middle-class coffin. I mean, how would you expect people with low incomes (which is most of us) to possibly send their kids to school K through 12 when they can't even afford to send their kids to a two-year technical school after high school?
A lot of folks love running Linux on these small devices. It's small, boots fast, does what you want it to do. I know I like Linux on these kinds of toys.
But, this one is billed out to be a mini-PC, and a lot of people wanted Windows on it, so Asus made a model that is big enough to run Windows.
I guess so. But out of the millions and millions of PC's that have shipped with Windows, only a very, very small few (thousands) have shipped with something like this. And of those, only a few hundred of these went out, and it's not like the virus was running - it was in the deleted items area.
Sloppy, yea, and a big oops. But really, I don't think it's that big a deal.
I guess it's the natural progression of things. Products die, OSS projects die. If there's a gap; a need for software that doesn't exist and is very important to the community, it will be created or an old project will be resurrected.
There is money in OSS. A lot of the big or important OSS projects have been able to bring in a good deal of money (I mean, look at mySQL, those guys made a small fortune from it) so I have no doubt that if mySQL dies out and there's no equivalent alternative (but there is already) we'll see a project come alive.
Bah. The Ultima series had excellent music (And Ultima 9, while the game could have been better, the music was incredible) and StarCraft was among my favorite music of any games.
This article is about music games, not music IN games, however. Meaning - the game is about the music (eg. Guitar Hero.)
Well then you should read the article because it's more about "music games" like Guitar Hero instead of music IN games.
Music in games has always been good or bad, and I think the same is true now. Not all Nintendo or c64 games had great music, just as not all new games do.
I think this is an example of "nostalgia" more than actual truth.
Well, I don't know about ANY options, but I have never had the PS3 not play a video encoded with DivX. Sony licensed DivX directly, so it should play anything encoded with it.
It plays most xVid codec encoded videos too, but not all of them.
First of all, not every product manufactured had to appeal to 90% of the market or sell 10 million units to be successful. Who knows what their target sell rate is, but it sure as hell won't be iPod numbers. A vendor could sell 10,000 cards and have a very successful product depending on R&D costs. For something like this, they just assembled existing parts onto a PCB and probably tied togeter some software for it.
I would love to be able to encode HD video with some decent speed. I've re-coded BD movies and they take SO LONG to encode that it's not worth it. I'd like to be able to convert whatever the BD movie is down to maybe half the bitrate - and I've seen some pretty damned good looking encodes at much lower rates than you find on a BD disc. It would be great for a media server to be able to share out HD video to your media players, and/or be able to build a collecting of HD movies on your media server. You an rip a BD movie now but on average they're all 20-30GB. If I could bring that down to 8 or 10 that would be really useful.
This is probably why not many people do it: It's to damned slow.
Actually, if your video is encoded with the DivX encoder, the PS3 will play it. It's only when the video is encoded by one of the "compatible" codecs do you run into issues. And, it might play them okay.. Sometimes not.
I have a few profiles set up in my various encoding apps, so I always get good DVD (with AC3) Rips for the PS3 and I can always convert downloaded videos/movies if necessary (usually not.)
The PS3 isn't as flexible as a PC for a media player but it's instant-on and it's pretty darned good. I play media over the network via TVersity.
Slashdot Mirror
I've played around with tcl/tk a bit and found it to be fun to use in the limited time I used it. You can get things up on the screen and do something useful with it almost immediately.
The only other language I've "programed" with is PHP.
I'm not a programmer, but I have been able to use PHP to make some pretty nice little dynamic web sites and mini-applications.
You don't have to be an expert to make effective use of it. You can open a PHP script and follow it.
The same can be true for many languages, I suppose - but for someone with practically no programming skills at all I've always found php to be the easiest to just pick up and do something useful with.
So, I'd say that one of the biggest reasons for it's popularity is that you can learn it very easily if you have no programming background. (I'm perhaps a special case, though - I consider myself to be a highly effective IT Systems Engineer with a great deal of background with computers so I pick these things up pretty quickly anyways.)
Hello Mr. Hyper-Sensitive Man!
I was actually referring to the original poster that posted AC - the one that said "I'll tell you what I didn't get: an operating system that can speak WPA2 without shitting all over itself."
I have actually run about a dozen WiFi network installation projects (businesses/schools with over 50 AP's) in the last year.
I've also consulted various businesses around the state as part of my job, and not a single one was using EAP because of device compatibility.
It's a good tech, and hopefully in a couple years we'll see more stabilization in the WiFi market and better support for Enterprise wired and wireless line-live encryption and authentication. Microsoft made some big improvements with Vista and Server 2008 with 802.1x support out of the box.
So, aren't you glad you made an ass of yourself and insulted the wrong person? Go fuck yourself you little bitch.
I consider powerful to be engine strength - but it can vary per car. Meaning, a powerful engine doesn't have to be a 500HP V8 if it's a small car.
It's funny to hear about a US car in another country - sometimes it seems like the US Auto Makers don't export any cars.
It's conscious, rather than subconscious, if you ask me. It's not a mystery like "what makes someone attractive" - you look at a car with a "mean" look and you know why. Aggressive angles, sharp lines, etc. And aggressive look equates to engine power and speed with a car.
Nearly everyone likes a "mean" looking automobile; mostly because car makers generally put "mean" looking designs into sports cars or put in powerful engines.
They also had to drive dangerously close to the big rig they were driving behind in order to achieve any significant fuel savings.
So, if you're comfortable driving 20 inches from the bumper of an 18-wheeler, you could save yourself 75 cents on the commute! Of course, you might die, but let's not let the details get in the way of fuel economy..
I've seen some people do some really stupid things lately, seemingly to save gas.
The other day I'm behind this lady at Burger King, and we were probably about 4 cars back. Every time we moved up, she'd start the car, drive up, and then turn it off.
At first I thought maybe the car was overheating, but then why not just go in? It was still early enough and the dining room was open.
I almost wanted to get out and tell her "You stupid shit head, starting your car squirts an ass load of gas into the cylinders - you've probably used more gas in this line than you would sitting idle for an hour!"
People can be such morons..
The single best way to save gas in any car is to simply drive smoothly - don't accelerate too fast, don't drive over 60-70 on the highway, and try to stay a constant speed while driving. That's it. It's not magic and there's no magic solution.
Perhaps that's what he meant, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that he was just trolling and couldn't figure out what the hell he was doing.
WPA-EAP isn't quite as common as you make it out to be though; most of the time you'll find multiple SSID's for various networks (or an automatic mac-based authentication scheme.) It sucks because Wireless encryption/auth is still a moving target and it can be difficult to find a middle-ground between supporting the most devices and having the best security.
"The poster was referring to the Department of Education (Federal), not "getting the government out of education". "
Actually, the quote was "Most conservative right-wingers want to get rid of the Department of Education and government out of education all together."
So, who's not reading?
"And that lots of liberals refer to the "growing rich/poor divide" and such...which means that the divide was smaller before the USDE existed."
Correlation is NOT causality. Learn this. We don't know how much worse shape we'd be in if there was NO DoE.
The US has undergone a very big shift in economics - we are no longer an industrial/factory focused economy, we are an intellectual and services economy. Not completely, of course; but the trend continues.
Because of this, we need more educated and skilled workers in the workforce to keep this edge, and that means education, and it means everyone needs to be well educated.
"BTW, conservatives are generally for publicly-funded education but not for publicly-provided education."
I don't know if this would work, and I don't know if we should risk trying. I'd need more than a belief by some conservatives (whom also continually insist on NO regulation or very little regulation in the markets) before I'll bite. Free market sounds nice, and in a world where people didn't try to screw everyone as much as possible for a buck it might work. Unfortunately we don't live in that world so we need to make sure people are properly protected from the extremely powerful corporations in our society. I don't have a single problem with corporations, or big one, or being absurdly rich. I just need to know that it's being done fairly.
Sure, our education system needs improvement, but I got a really good K-12 education and most kids in the country are offered the same opportunity. You hear a lot of about failing schools in inner-city areas but the vast majority of the citizens in this country don't live in highly urban areas and public schools offer a good education.
I think the biggest problem in education in our society is "higher education" or the fact that a lot of us simply can't afford it, and the mistaken ideal that everyone should have a traditional college education for a general degree, instead of more focus on trade-specific schools which would be better for a great many people.
I don't base my decisions or ideals on someone else's ideals. I base them on my own experience and what I've learned. I hope you think about doing the same some day.
It's probably a "YMMV" type thing. Both notebooks I've been running Ubuntu on have Intel WNICs. And, there's sometimes big differences between Intel cards. Maybe I've gotten lucky.
The support is there in the OS, and I've found that Ununtu is better at dealing with LAN/WLAN switching and VPN connections than Vista (more flexibility for sure) and the problems usually come from driver issues (or kludgy work-arounds to make them work under Linux.)
So, you're pissed because you procrastinated until the last days of your warranty, and you ended up being late. And then, they told you to call them (with the hope that they might be able to do something for you) and you don't want to call them because you're lazy.
I don't love Apple and I think their prices are way too high for what you get, but c'mon man, that's stretching it. You screwed up. Don't blame Apple for your stupidity.
If it were up to "your kind" of conservative, the US would look like India: Extremely wealthy people live in high society and everyone else lives in dirt huts.
Getting the government out of education would put the final nail in the middle-class coffin. I mean, how would you expect people with low incomes (which is most of us) to possibly send their kids to school K through 12 when they can't even afford to send their kids to a two-year technical school after high school?
I got to think you just DON'T GET IT.
A lot of folks love running Linux on these small devices. It's small, boots fast, does what you want it to do. I know I like Linux on these kinds of toys.
But, this one is billed out to be a mini-PC, and a lot of people wanted Windows on it, so Asus made a model that is big enough to run Windows.
Ho hum.
I guess so. But out of the millions and millions of PC's that have shipped with Windows, only a very, very small few (thousands) have shipped with something like this. And of those, only a few hundred of these went out, and it's not like the virus was running - it was in the deleted items area.
Sloppy, yea, and a big oops. But really, I don't think it's that big a deal.
Strange. I am using Ubuntu right now using WPA2 and it seems to be working. Or, I could just be imagining this.
Which is entirely possible, because I can't understand why someone would be afraid to post a slashdot post without clicking the Anonymous button.
I guess it's the natural progression of things. Products die, OSS projects die. If there's a gap; a need for software that doesn't exist and is very important to the community, it will be created or an old project will be resurrected.
There is money in OSS. A lot of the big or important OSS projects have been able to bring in a good deal of money (I mean, look at mySQL, those guys made a small fortune from it) so I have no doubt that if mySQL dies out and there's no equivalent alternative (but there is already) we'll see a project come alive.
Aww come on, if you're going to mentio Rob Hubbard and company, you can't omit The Fat Man.
This article was about music games, not music IN games.
Bah. The Ultima series had excellent music (And Ultima 9, while the game could have been better, the music was incredible) and StarCraft was among my favorite music of any games.
This article is about music games, not music IN games, however. Meaning - the game is about the music (eg. Guitar Hero.)
Well then you should read the article because it's more about "music games" like Guitar Hero instead of music IN games.
Music in games has always been good or bad, and I think the same is true now. Not all Nintendo or c64 games had great music, just as not all new games do.
I think this is an example of "nostalgia" more than actual truth.
Well, I don't know about ANY options, but I have never had the PS3 not play a video encoded with DivX. Sony licensed DivX directly, so it should play anything encoded with it.
It plays most xVid codec encoded videos too, but not all of them.
First of all, not every product manufactured had to appeal to 90% of the market or sell 10 million units to be successful. Who knows what their target sell rate is, but it sure as hell won't be iPod numbers. A vendor could sell 10,000 cards and have a very successful product depending on R&D costs. For something like this, they just assembled existing parts onto a PCB and probably tied togeter some software for it.
I would love to be able to encode HD video with some decent speed. I've re-coded BD movies and they take SO LONG to encode that it's not worth it. I'd like to be able to convert whatever the BD movie is down to maybe half the bitrate - and I've seen some pretty damned good looking encodes at much lower rates than you find on a BD disc. It would be great for a media server to be able to share out HD video to your media players, and/or be able to build a collecting of HD movies on your media server. You an rip a BD movie now but on average they're all 20-30GB. If I could bring that down to 8 or 10 that would be really useful.
This is probably why not many people do it: It's to damned slow.
Actually, if your video is encoded with the DivX encoder, the PS3 will play it. It's only when the video is encoded by one of the "compatible" codecs do you run into issues. And, it might play them okay.. Sometimes not.
I have a few profiles set up in my various encoding apps, so I always get good DVD (with AC3) Rips for the PS3 and I can always convert downloaded videos/movies if necessary (usually not.)
The PS3 isn't as flexible as a PC for a media player but it's instant-on and it's pretty darned good. I play media over the network via TVersity.
Well, perhaps. But remember, the PS3 runs on Cell and you can develop for Cell on Linux if you install it on the PS3.
I don't think Linux support for a card like this is out of the question.
Man. So many doomsayers around here lately.
Wow! You have no idea how computers and grahpics cards work, do you?
This card is supposed to do HD Encoding. Not just decoding.
Show me a current application that uses your GPU to do good H.264 or MPEG2 encoding in realtime and I'll bite.